Amalia Cabusao

IT WAS midweek, when work is half done and finding some downtime is a shot in the dark. But when Nikki Gomez called to invite me to a book launch, we cleared our schedules to show up and support his new work.

Nikki and his wife, Neng, are among the couples I felt a deep kinship with more than two decades ago. We might not see each other often, but I hold enduring admiration for their dedication to family and community.

So last Wednesday, seated beside close friend Patmei Bello Ruivivar and Ms. Marilyn Roque, the grand dame of our lifestyle section, we witnessed the unfolding story of Bukas Loob sa Diyos (BLD). We were deeply touched by the testimonies of members who have served this charismatic community here for more than three decades.

From the stories told, we realize that our greatest strength has never been about individualism. Over the years, watching how local faith-based communities like BLD, cultural networks, and neighborhood circles operate on the ground has reshaped our view of what keeps a city whole.

Resilience is not just about bouncing back from hardship, but about the quiet, deliberate choice to refuse to carry the weight alone. The story of Nikki’s medical scare last year, which occurred right in the middle of the book’s conceptualization, visibly moved the crowd. Through this and many other stories of triumph over despair, we were reminded that when people bind themselves together through shared values and spiritual grace, they build an invisible safety net. They create spaces where vulnerability is met with sanctuary, and individual burdens are lightened because someone else is willing to help carry them.
BLD celebrated it three decades by coming out with a coffee-table book, “Witnessing: Three Decades of Faith,” at the well-appointed heritage house turned events place, Tio Nonings at Juna Subdivision. The room was packed with Titos and Titas who made up this faith-based family.

Witnessing these communities endure and adapt over decades proves that our true regional wealth is human connection. It reminds us that togetherness is the real infrastructure of Davao—a living fabric woven every single time ordinary people decide to show up, hold space, and walk side by side through the shifting seasons of life.
This is what matters.

Last Saturday, media practitioners from across the Davao region gathered at Holy Cross of Davao for a rare, clear-eyed discussion on artificial intelligence and its impact on regional storytelling. Supported by the Ayala Foundation, the one-day workshop provided a vital framework for engaging with AI—particularly within the realities of local newsrooms navigating a lack of support infrastructure that often hinders regional competitiveness.

Keynote speaker Jaemark Tordecillas, who previously led newsroom digitalization as editor of GMA News Online, illustrated how AI applications extend far beyond simple transcription and text summarization. Highlighting data-mining techniques, Tordecillas demonstrated how automated analysis of complex public datasets—such as National Health Survey metrics on stunting, teenage pregnancy, and contraceptive access—can surface critical, under-reported stories essential to public policy and community welfare.

Every time a new wave of technology breaks over our newsrooms, the refrain sounds familiar: this changes everything, and nothing will ever be the same.

Having been in the media profession for some time, we experienced firsthand how it was decades ago, when newsrooms traded typewriter ribbons for glowing CRT monitors, and thermal fax paper gave way to digital inboxes. We felt it when social media algorithms disrupted print schedules, instantly turning every smartphone holder into a publisher. Today, as generative AI enters newsrooms, creative studios, and university classrooms across Davao, that familiar anxiety returns. Generative tools can draft reports in seconds, pull insights from vast spreadsheets before you can reach for your calculator, and format copy with precision.

Naturally, the existential question surfaces in quiet conversations in bars and coffee shops where senior journalists meet. Are journalists becoming obsolete? Is the craft of the regional storyteller being handed over to just anybody?

The short answer—for those who live and breathe journalism—is no. But the real answer requires us to step back from the technological noise and remember why local community journalism exists in the first place.

Machines excel at processing patterns, organizing raw data, and predicting the next logical word. An algorithm can digest a hundred pages of a city council ordinance, summarize a complex court filing, or transcribe hours of interview audio in minutes. That is speed and efficiency—mechanics that free a reporter to do actual reporting.

What no algorithm can do, however, is walk the trails to a remote barangay, look at the rubble of a demolished community in Boulevard, or catch the pain in the voice of a mother anguishing over her child’s health. An algorithm cannot sit on a wooden chair in a crowded school gym and feel the anxiety of evacuees as their houses are washed away by raging waters. It has no lived memory of Davao’s streets, and no personal stake in the future of Mindanao.

This is why it remains so difficult to reconstruct the history of Davao City. Even the fairly recent Kadayawan Festival history had city councilors and city executives scrambling for data, for lack of reliable documents—a dilemma resolved only through archival records and interviews provided by the Davao Historical Society.

The task of editors, journalists, and media educators is neither to panic nor to blindly surrender to automated convenience. It is to hold the line for the human element. The core work of the local press has never been merely manufacturing sentences; it is about witnessing, verifying, framing, and caring deeply about the community we serve.

Technology will keep evolving, but readers do not turn to a trusted local page simply for quick words. They turn to it for accountability, for regional context, and for a voice grounded in the very soil they walk on.

Tools will change with the times, but the human heart behind the story—that remains all that matters.

LAST week, the Function Room of the Pinnacle Hotel was packed with representatives across the island during the Mindanao Summit on Migration Environment, Peace and Development. This theme recognizes “that migration in Mindanao is deeply interconnected with inequality, environmental degradation, landlessness, climate change, conflict, disasters, displacement, labor exploitation, gnder injustice, and uneven development. These interlocking conditions shape the vulnerabilities and choices of migrants, their families and their communities.”

One of the thematic areas during the summit was the irregular migration corridors presented by the Interagency Council Against Trafficking –  National Special Committee on Irregular Migration Corridors (IACAT-NSCIMC) What we found disturbing was the emerging new pathway for trafficking using technology.

On June 20, 2025, six people walked into the Davao International Airport carrying what looked like an ordinary weekend booking to Singapore. It was not. Bureau of Immigration officers who flagged the group found they had been recruited by a fellow Filipino. Through the social media platform Telegram, they were promised jobs as customer service representatives in Cambodia, and handed fake travel documents and a return ticket to make the trip look like tourism. One of the six had already paid the recruiter ₱50,000. The BI said the pattern — same platform, same cover story, same route out of Davao — pointed to a single syndicate running recruitment on repeat. 

That single case is not one of a kind. It is a symptom of something Davao City’s own data has been quietly confirming for a yearthis city is not just a place where trafficking victims come from. It is a place where trafficking is organized. 

Councilor Rachel Zozobrado, who chairs the city council’s Committee on Internal Relations and Migrant Workers, laid out the numbers in a privilege speech this year that should unsettle anyone who thinks of scamhub trafficking as a Manila problem, or a Myanmar problem, or someone else’s problem. Davao City recorded 72 human traffickingrelated cases in 2025 — the highest of any local government unit in the entire Davao Region. Davao del Norte followed with 13, Davao Oriental with 12, Davao del Sur with 10, Davao de Oro with two, and Davao Occidental with none. 

Zoom into the barangay level and the geography sharpens further. Of the 72 individuals in DavaoCity who sought an Illegal Recruitment Certificate, the largest numbers came from Talomo (16), Marilog (15), Toril (nine), and Calinan (seven), with smaller clusters in Buhangin, Bunawan, Poblacion, Agdao, Paquibato, and Tugbok. Eleven more cases could not be traced to a specific barangay but were confirmed to have originated in the city. 

Perhaps the most damning figure, though, is one that flips the usual victim narrative on its head. Citing Department of Migrant Workers Region XI data, Zozobrado said 60 percent of suspected illegal recruiters operating anywhere in the Davao Region are themselves residents of, or maintain offices in, Davao City. We are not simply exporting the vulnerable. We are housing the recruiters. 

This is the backdrop against which Zozobrado filed the proposed Safe Migration Ordinance in Davao — the Kalinga sa Miranteng Dabawenyo Ordinance of 2026. Her diagnosis of the current system is blunt: it reacts to harm instead of preventing it. “Investigations are done only after a complaint. Rescues are made after the abuse,” she told the council, describing a protection framework that only switches on once someone has already been defrauded, confined, or worse. 

The ordinance would designate a month each year — Davao City Safe Migration and Anti-Illegal Recruitment Month — for a sustained information campaign across city channels, aimed at the specific, learnable warning signs of trafficking recruitment: passport confiscation, contract substitution, deployment on a tourist visa instead of a work visa, coerced accommodation debt, and the recruitment of minors. It would also build something Davao currently lacks — a single, clear referral pathway. A Davao City Safe Migration OFW Families’ Welfare and Crisis Center would connect directly to the Local Committee on Anti-Trafficking, and from there to the  IACAT, the DSWD, and the PNP Women and Children Protection Desk. 

It is worth pairing this local push with what is happening nationally, because Davao’s recruiters are not operating in a vacuum. The Anti-POGO Act of 2025 permanently banned offshore gaming operations after years of evidence that POGO licenses were being used as legal cover for scam hubs — the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking itself confirmed as much to the Senate. But the ban has not ended the industry; it has scattered it. Raids since the law took effect — dozens of workers rounded up in Parañaque, Makati, and Pasig, roughly 400 foreign nationals arrested in one Manila scam farm — show operators simply dropping the POGO label while running the same operations. IACAT investigators have even flagged a grim adaptation: some previously raided operators started hiring more Filipinos instead of foreigners, specifically to look less like a trafficking case on paper. 

Meanwhile the recruitment pipeline that starts in Davao does not stop at Singapore or Cambodia. A National Bureau of Investigation case this May involved 25 Filipinos repatriated from Myanmar who told investigators they were promised legitimate customer service jobs and instead found their passports confiscated, their movement restricted, and quotas enforced through intimidation and financial penalties once they were inside a scam compound. Their recruiter, NBI confirmed, was never licensed by the Department of Migrant Workers to begin with. 

That last detail is the thread connecting all of it. Almost none of these operations require sophistication to stop at the source, they require a licensing check, a referral desk, a barangay official who knows what contract substitution looks like, and a family that knows where to ask before a son or daughter boards a flight. Zozobrado’s ordinance is not a dramatic intervention. It is a plumbing fix: routing information and complaints to the agencies that already exist, before the harm rather than after it. 

Davao City has spent the last year producing the clearest local picture in Mindanao of how this trade actually works, which barangays, which platforms, which cover stories, which percentage of the region’s recruiters call this city home. What the city does with that picture now, whether the council passes an ordinance built on prevention or waits for the next family to claim a child at the airport cargo bay, is the test of whether all that data amounts to anything more than a very well-documented tragedy.  This matters most.

In a recent Throwback Thursday forum hosted by the Davao Historical Society, Luzvimina Ilagan opened the session with a simple, familiar greeting: “Kumain na ba kayo?”

​It’s a phrase every Filipino knows by heart. More than just a polite check-in, it is our unique way of showing care, warmth, and compassion. It reminds us that food, and the simple comfort of a full belly, lies at the very heart of how we connect.

​We don’t just sit around the dining table to eat- we gather to unravel the day, celebrate small victories, and share life’s heavier burdens.

​As food blogger and tourism advocate Gracie Plata pointed out during the forum, the table is often the true soul of a Filipino home. It’s where we eat, work, study, and play. Food, no matter how humble, remains central to who we are.

​No matter where in the world life takes us, you can bet a Filipino will always look at you and ask: “Kumain ka na?”

Of course, life in the city beats to a different rhythm. While we still fiercely hold onto the tradition of home-cooked meals, the sheer pace of urban life has forced a quiet shift.

​Convenience has become the default. Many families now rely on takeout or eating out simply to keep up with the day, leaving kids increasingly accustomed to quick, highly processed meals. Slowly but surely, the relentless commercial tide of fast food is encroaching on the simple sanctuary of the family table.

As an advocate for the Slow Food movement, nutritionist Wit Holganza offers a mindful alternative. Now managing her own farm in Davao, she champions local agriculture and leads the charge for a meaningful return to the land, reminding us that true nourishment begins right at the source.

While we don’t claim to have a single, specific palate—being a melting pot of indigenous and migrant food cultures—we take immense pride in the freshness of our produce, seafood, meats, and fruits. Known as the country’s food basket, we are truly blessed with this abundance. The Kadayawan Festival in August highlights this blessing, as we celebrate the harvest season with markets overflowing with fresh produce.

​In our culture, asking “Kumain ka na?” (Have you eaten?) is more than just a casual question, it’s a heartfelt expression of care and warmth. This is what matters.

Last Saturday evening, friends of writer Patmei Ruivivar gathered at the well-appointed home of Irene “Inday” Santiago, high up in the hills of Maa, to celebrate a life well lived. With the wide expanse of the city’s night lights as a backdrop, the conversation was easy and congenial, punctuated by an exceptional meal prepared by Bingle Santiago.

Because a few guests had just returned from brief vacations, the chatter naturally drifted to how we have officially reached the exact halfway point of the year. January 1st seems a long time ago, a day when New Year’s resolutions were made with absolute confidence that this would be the year we achieved them. But as one friend pointed out, we have instead arrived at the “mid-year mirage,” a place where our carefully curated to-do lists have been buried under months of project deadlines and the frantic pace of daily life.

We look back and think, Where on earth did the first six months go? We look forward and think, How do I already feel this tired?

Society constantly insists that life must be a relentless, upward race of productive endeavors. There is no grace for slowing down, even for those in their senior years. We are expected to hustle through every single second, driven by the unspoken fear that if we stop, we might fall prey to dementia or the various ailments of aging.

But trying to maintain peak performance all year round is like driving a car across the country without ever stopping for gas or an oil change. Eventually, the engine is going to sputter and die.

July is the universe giving us a natural pit stop. It is a metaphorical rest area on the highway of the year, a vital chance to step off the gas and stretch our legs.

Finding these moments of pause doesn’t require a grand vacation; sometimes, it just requires community. Take the breakfast club at Swiss Deli Matina, which has been meeting for about a decade. It stands as an iconic example of this kind of gentle reset.

At 80-something, the group’s unofficial leader, Dinky Munda, has masterfully encouraged people of a certain age, regardless of gender, to start each day on a bright note. Together, they gather to dissect politics, deliberate on local events, and, of course, trade stories about the prominent figures who influence the daily rhythm of the city.

In a world that demands constant output, spaces like a hilltop dinner or a morning deli counter are where we refuel. They remind us that pausing isn’t quitting, it’s simply how we keep the engine running.

True wellness isn’t about crushing every single milestone on a checklist. It’s about spending an afternoon sitting in a coffee shop, reading a light novel, or mindlessly scrolling through a viral Chinese short drama, without feeling a shred of panic about what you “should” be doing.

Instead of using this halfway point to beat yourself up over what you haven’t accomplished, use it to celebrate the fact that you made it here. And this painfully reminds us of our friends who have gone ahead of us.

We still have an entire second half of the year staring us in the face. There is plenty of time for new adventures, sudden inspirations, and quiet joys. For now, taking a breath, leaning into community, and letting ourselves simply rest—that is all that matters.

Long before the island exploded across social media for its mystical “Fairy Walk” and death-defying cliff dives, Siquijor was where travelers from neighboring provinces went for some serious downtime. Roughly the size of Samal, the island has always kept its coves and lagoons just a scenic motorcycle ride away.

But among its many coastal treasures, one inland destination demands a quiet pause: the San Isidro Labrador Parish Church and Convent in Lazi. Stepping onto its grounds always brings a profound sense of peace—like walking directly into the layered, sometimes heavy remnants of our colonial past.

​Established as an independent parish on August 8, 1857, under the Augustinian Recollect missionaries, Lazi’s spiritual foundations run deeper than its stone walls. Our guide, Denis, shared an intriguing piece of institutional memory: the parish was actually administered by secular, diocesan priests before the Recollects took over. However, it was under the direction of a Recollect friar, Fr. Toribio Sánchez, that the grand structures we see today began to take shape.

​What stands now is a monument to the sweat and skill of late 19th-century Filipino artisans. Completed in 1884, with its companion bell tower rising a year later, the church is a breathtaking example of neoclassical architecture. It feels deeply rooted in the island because it is literally made of it—built from massive coral stones hauled and quarried from Siquijor’s surrounding reefs, and reinforced with the enduring strength of native molave hardwood that once abounded in the area.

​Inside the church, the preservation of its original elements is remarkable. The original wood flooring still creaks softly underfoot, leading the eyes toward the twin pulpits and the weathered dignity of the original retablo (altar centerpiece). Across the street sits its sprawling convent—one of the largest in Asia—which remains functional to this day, its second floor still safekeeping centuries-old Church artifacts.

​History has rightfully taken notice of this heritage. The complex was declared a National Historical Landmark in 1984, followed by its designation as a National Cultural Treasure by the National Museum of the Philippines in 2001. Since 2006, it has rested on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List as part of the “Baroque Churches of the Philippines (Extension)” collective, alongside the equally storied parishes of Boljoon, Guiuan, Loboc, and Tumauini.

​Standing in the nave, watching the afternoon light filter through the old windows, you realize that Lazi is not only an architectural marvel but, like most old structures, bridges the past to help us better understand our identity. That matters.

June arrives every year dressed in color—rainbow flags catching the breeze, laughter spilling into the streets, and voices rising not just in celebration, but in defiance. For those unfamiliar with or unmoved by Pride, the spectacle can seem excessive, even puzzling. Why the noise? Why the flags? Why, after all this time, the marches?

We march because the right to exist—fully, openly, and without apology—is not yet guaranteed everywhere. And where it is, it was fought for.

To understand the weight of that fight, one needs only to look at how these global ripples touch our local shores. Last Thursday, the Davao Historical Society’s Throwback Thursday forum at the Abreeza Mall turned its lens toward our recent past, unpacking the evolution of gender in pop culture to coincide with Pride Month. The goal was to trace how today’s creative landscape is slowly shattering old stereotypes, moving away from the rigid, often harmful media tropes of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to carve out spaces for authentic representation.

But history isn’t just found in old television clips; it lives in the memories of those who survived it.

Panelists Olson Rivera and Bobby Castillo, high school batchmates from the Ateneo de Davao, recalled a time when they were known as part of the “Huling Barako”—the final all-male batch before the campus went co-ed. Growing up in the 1970s and early ’80s, the local queer community was far from vibrant; social stigma was thick, heavy, and silent.

For Bobby, a deeply accepting family provided a rare shield, giving him the safety to be loud, proud, and free. Olson’s path required a different kind of armor: she had to study relentlessly and excel academically just to secure positive attention and support from her parents. Decades later, Rowen Gonzales, a Gen Z student from the University of the Philippines Mindanao, reminded the room that while the new generation stands firmly on the shoulders of these pioneers, they face entirely new anxieties in a hyper-connected digital age.

Some of those persistent challenges are structural, deeply tied to basic human rights. Jesse Madriaga, the forum’s moderator and the communication management focal for the Department of Health, noted that health remains a primary battleground.

“The conversation about health is inextricably linked to the journeys shared by the LGBT community,” Madriaga observed. As HIV education, testing, and treatment become more accessible, the community has a greater opportunity to practice holistic care. This means looking beyond medicine to nurture safe spaces, provide robust mental health support, and aggressively address gender-based violence.

“We live with joy and love with pride,” Madriaga said, “knowing that the choices to better our health are as diverse as the identities and lifestyles we celebrate.”

This local tapestry of struggle and progress mirrors a much longer global timeline. Pride began not as a party, but as a protest. On June 28, 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City—led largely by transgender women of color and gay men—fought back against a brutal police raid. That single uprising sparked a global movement. The first Pride marches the following year were acts of raw survival, a collective shout into the void: we are here, we are human, we are not going away.

More than five decades later, the landscape has fundamentally shifted. Dozens of countries have legalized same-sex unions. Public figures live openly across a spectrum of identities. In the Philippines, localized anti-discrimination ordinances protect LGBTQ+ individuals in several major cities, and queer representation in literature and media has grown exponentially. Young people today grow up with a nuanced vocabulary—queer, non-binary, pansexual, gender fluid—that simply did not exist in mainstream discourse a generation ago.

Pride, then, is less about checking a box of victories and more about a statement of presence: the struggle continues, and those who have survived deserve to be witnessed.

To understand why this resonance runs so deep, we must look at what is actually at stake in the human experience of identity. Social theorists have long argued that identity is not something we are born with, fully formed. It is something we actively construct through interaction, language, and social recognition.

Psychologist Erik Erikson’s foundational work established that a coherent sense of self is a psychological necessity. We form who we are in response to the social world around us; when that world rejects a core part of our being, the damage is existential. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall described identity as a continuous process—never fixed, never complete, but perpetually produced through lived experience.

More recently, philosopher Judith Butler’s work on performativity deepened this understanding. Butler argues that gender is not an inner essence, but a series of repeated social performances shaped by rigid cultural norms that reward conformity and punish deviation. When LGBTQ+ individuals refuse to perform the gender or sexuality assigned to them, they are not confused—they are being honest. Their visibility disrupts the comforting illusion that there is only one acceptable way to be human.

This truth was aptly captured by Bobby Castillo during the forum, who recalled a common, conditional acceptance from his youth: “You can be gay. But be a good gay.” Today, that survival mechanism is evolving into something simpler and far more profound: you can be whatever you want to be—just be a good human being.

This is precisely why representation matters. When a young person sees someone like themselves on a screen, in a book, or in a classroom—and that person is not portrayed as a villain, a punchline, or a tragedy—something shifts in their sense of possibility. Identity construction requires mirrors. Pride holds those mirrors up.

To celebrate Pride is not to declare final victory. It is to hold space for those who are still afraid to speak their truth. Until that space is safe for everyone, the colors matter. The noise matters. The march matters.

We used to brag about our streets. For years, Davao City wore its cleanliness like a badge of honor, a badge to a disciplined populace. But walk outside today, and that pride evaporates into a thick haze.

Lately, the entire city has been deeply disturbed—not just by the sickening stench of rotting stacks of garbage, but by the very real, ticking health timebomb these eyesores present to residents. Piles of plastic bags, organic waste, and discarded packaging sit melting under the unforgiving tropical sun by day, only to be washed into our drainage systems by intermittent rains at night.

In the blink of an eye, a city famously known for its pristine streets is wrestling with its most basic civic duty: deciding where to put its trash.

Our waste management services didn’t just slide downhill; they collapsed. Literally.

On May 20, 2026, following days of torrential rain, an unstable mountain of garbage at the New Carmen Sanitary Landfill gave way. The resulting trash slide was catastrophic. It claimed the life of one resident, left several others injured, and exposed an underbelly of long-ignored violations—from dangerously steep slopes to inadequate leachate treatment. Within 48 hours, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) suspended landfill operations to facilitate retrieval efforts and ensure slope stabilization.

Suddenly, the invisible became impossible to ignore.

The New Carmen facility, a seven-hectare site that opened back in 2009, has been gasping for air for years. While the city has planned a Php 500-million expansion for an adjacent nine-hectare facility, that future fix does nothing for the present crisis. Councilor Tek Ocampo, chairperson of the City Council Committee for the Environment, stated the obvious last week: the city has to collect garbage, given the staggering volume we generate daily.

How much is that, exactly? Davao churns out 700 to 800 tons of trash per day. That means the city produces roughly 50 kilos of waste daily per resident. It is a crushing, unsustainable weight.

Here is the tragedy of our situation: over 60% of our daily trash consists of organic kitchen and food waste.

Read that again. More than half of what is currently choking our streets is biodegradable. If we simply separated our food scraps and organic matter at the source, we could drastically reduce the immediate volume suffocating our neighborhoods.

The Reality Check: We don’t have a garbage problem as much as we have a segregation problem.

The campaign for proper waste management has been going on for over a decade. The call for household-level segregation has been consistently promoted, yet these efforts haven’t shifted our collective behavior. We continue to throw away household waste mixed carelessly with recyclable or reusable materials.

Years ago, the concept of color-coded trash bins failed because the logistics weren’t there; we didn’t have different trucks to collect different wastes. Because the system felt broken, our collective desire for proper waste management just went down the drain. We returned to what was comfortable: dumping everything into a single black bag and hoping it would disappear from sight like magic.

Yet, a casual drive through our neighborhoods tells a completely different story. The system is failing on the ground because the chain of discipline has broken at the household level.
It is deeply alarming to watch our city change because uncollected garbage is now sitting on street corners like it’s renting space. We don’t have to imagine the swarms of flies or the rodents gallivanting across these piles—we see them. It’s a commercial nightmare, especially where rows of restaurants serve food just meters away from rotting waste. Worse, whenever heavy rains burst those bags open, toxic leachate seeps directly into our drainage, raising the terrifying specter of waterborne illnesses.

This crisis is a loud, foul-smelling wake-up call. We can no longer treat waste management as an invisible utility that operates on a single-site dependency. We cannot just throw things “away,” because “away” has officially run out of room.

Until the new facility opens its gates, our health and sanity rest on a fragile compromise. The government must fast-track safe, modern engineering at the landfill, but we, as households, must finally take segregation seriously. If we refuse to change our behavior at the kitchen sink, we will continue to pay a heavy, hazardous price for the trash we so eagerly try to push out of sight. That’s what matters.