A subway car full of praying Catholic teenagers carried me home from the airport late last month.

Two weeks before, when I left Toronto, the city’s hot story was not a mud-packed Catholic campground or hordes of chanting youth on pilgrimage to see the Pope. It was a strike thatsaw taxpayers sizzling, the mayor steaming and rhetoric rising like abad smell.

But after time spent in a scruffier country than ours, I return tosee it all wiped away, barely a memory in Toronto newspapers’online archives. Toronto’s garbage days are over.

Perhaps this makes my original observation even clearer.

During the 16-day strike of Toronto’s outdoor workers — includinggarbage collectors — nobody was talking about the one thing you’d thinkthey’d be talking about: the garbage.

Sure, there were fearful discussions about the growth of garbagepiles, the desperation people felt and the threat of invading rodents.The media covered the long waits at disposal stations and excitedcommunities coming together to deal with illegal dumpsites in theirneighbourhoods. And, near the end, with but a grain of patience and afew dollops of hysteria, we waited to see if the provincialgovernment would legislate the 6,800 striking workers of CUPE local416 back to their jobs.

And of course they did.

All without a word about the garbage.

Somehow, it seemed that the mess wasn’t ours. We watched itproliferate as if it were just another ugly fact of life, like an accidentalpregnancy or a disease.Without someone to take it all away, we were freaked out, disturbed,in shock. It grew like a rapid cancer, overwhelmingour garden sheds, the sidewalks where people insisted on piling it,seemingly heedless of the strike. It ballooned out of city garbagebins, as if their mere presence, whether being emptied or not, gaveus permission to place our refuse there, carefully balanced on theheap.

The garbage strike of 2002 wasn’t all that long ago. (It began June 26.) But why does it feel like everything’s gone back to normal?

“Normal” is not just that we are a capitalist society. “Normal” isalso that we are in collective denial. There we were, face to facewith our daily 2.2 kilos of garbage, knee deep in the dilemma ofhaving no place to put our effect while the cause just kept pluggingaway.

Wasn’t it odd that while Toronto Hydro asked us to turnourair-conditioners down when we hit record levels of electricityconsumption this summer, hardly a voice uttered a similar suggestion aboutthe garbageduring the strike?

Gee, create less of a mess? Alas, this would impact theeconomy. An economy that furthers itself through certain core, unquestionable values — like a belief in theimportance of convenience.

An ideal all us busy workers are after, convenience has become almost anethic, considered a necessary attribute of our lives.Products sell themselves by the glorified C word and we buy thembecause of it. Thinking about the future, about our impact, about theslippery environmental slope we are on is, after all, inconvenient.Perhaps this is why no one talked about the garbage and also why manyof us are relieved to sink back into our former way of being, blessedto live in the kind of country where men in overalls take away ourwaste.

To raise questions about the sheer amount of trash we saw piling upday after day during the biggest strike in Canadian history wouldmean taking a look at ourselves. It would mean realizing that, despitewhat the system says, we can’t always get what we want withoutconsequences.

Let me give you an example. A diaper company that shall go unnamedhas launched a disposable baby-wipe product. The friendly motheringvoice on its commercial cheerfully proclaims “the best thing tohappen for your baby since disposable diapers.”

Sure, if your baby wants to grow up in a world of trash. According toEnvironment Canada, Canadiansthrow away 1.7 billion disposable diapers every year. Somehow, perhaps because we’ve been told so long that wecan, we believe that convenience is ofhigher importance than its ultimate effect.

It’s true, the system works well this way — as long as theconsequences are nicely hidden and the truth isn’t smearedall over the sidewalk.

Talking about our garbage isn’t only scary. It interferes with ourplans, with the ease of our lives, with the kind of life we’ve beensubtly, since childhood, encouraged to want and to expect here in North America.

We — and, certainly, the system — have a lot invested in maintaining the cleaner, nicer-smelling, sanitizedview of the world that was disrupted for a while during those few smellyweeks in Toronto. But at what ultimate cost?