The Chair’s Corner

Sweet Soaps and a Terrible Stench
by Gary Commins

Years before Muriel Lester became one of Gandhi’s friends, before she was an Ambassador-at-Large for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, before she founded Kingsley Hall to work with the poorest of London’s poor, when she was a child, she had a memorable experience on an ordinary day.
As she rode on a train through London, a terrible stench suddenly filled her compartment. Adults rushed – too late – to close the windows. Flustered, she asked what caused such a horrible odor. Unruffled, her nanny said that it was the factories that made the sweet-smelling soaps that her privileged family used at home. Her nanny told her not to worry about the people who lived near the factories. They weren’t like Muriel. They didn’t have the same feelings.
Recently, I told this story to the Los Angeles Port Commission. The Los Angeles and Long Beach Ports are multi-billion dollar businesses. Every day the Ports welcome the consumer products – the sweet-smelling soaps – our society craves to feed its insatiable gluttony. The job of the Ports, as one Long Beach Commissioner told a delegation of clergy, is to “generate wealth.”
The Ports also generate injustice, an environmental disaster, and health nightmares. Instead of trains passing near factories, in Southern California trucks pass through neighborhoods leaving behind poisoned air and congested lungs.
Although politely unspoken, the same attitude Muriel Lester heard prevails today: Those people? The children suffering in the asthma epidemic? The truckers working long hours without benefits? The deaths directly caused and indirectly induced by diesel exhaust? They don’t matter. They aren’t like us.
Labor and environmental groups work together through a Coalition for Clean Ports to advocate for a solution that provides decent working conditions for truck drivers and healthier living conditions for families living near the ports and freeways.
For people of faith, there is a spiritual connection between health, justice, and the environment. We do not live by a living wage alone, by healthy lungs alone, or by clean air alone. But a just resolution of this issue requires not even one strand of moral fiber. The Coalition’s proposals are systemic and pragmatic. Yet neither principles nor pragmatism hold any sway with the Port Commissions.
Powerful people blissfully ignore the stench of injustice, ill health, and a poisoned environment, but they have a keen sense of smell in discerning political winds. They can try to satisfy one part of the coalition – the environmentalists – and pry them apart from their allies in labor. If it were politically viable, they would do the opposite. Time will tell if the Coalition’s center holds.
Today’s sweet-smelling soaps – the products to appease the bottomless abyss of our appetites, the wealth generated by the ports – still mar the environment, scar children’s lungs, and lay siege to decency. The cost is born by ordinary people who – apparently – still do not matter. For some, the Ports are sweetness; for others, they stink.
Gary Commins is the Chair of the National Executive Council, Rector of St. Luke’s Church in Long Beach, California, Deputy to General Convention, and author of Becoming Bridges: The Spirit and Practice of Diversity.