So what do you do when the honeymoon is over?  Move house. 

We’ve been in the throes of moving for the better part of two weeks.   I’ve got a fair amount of stuff and she’s got a fair amount of stuff, a term which in her case includes such sundries as the packaging for everything she owns, every shopping bag that has entered the premises, and two thousand record albums (including some truly great 70s era funk, soul and reggae).  Comparing our stuff is in this manner is unfair  – my life’s sundries are sitting in a buddy’s attic in New Jersey and, mostly, in my folks’ spare room.  Lawyers call that an “admission against interest”:  having Mom sort my stuff from time to time ranks pretty high on the Loser chart for somebody over the age of 30, let alone 50. It’s part of the humanitarian identity.

Anyway, moving involves throwing stuff out.  Not a little stuff.  Lots of stuff.  So I’ve now earned a PhD in the demise of the British Empire, as exemplified in their ability to produce a decent garbage bag.  I’ve been buying the “heavy duty” models; real garden and trash bags.  Green and black rolls.   These bags should be manly, designed to satisfy the deepest of macho DIY urges.  These bags should be the plastic equivalent of a crowbar or a paint stripping machine. 

Well, thus far, and I think I’ve been through the full assortment of bags on the market, the Brits seem to have a problem with the concept of “heavy duty”.  As far as I can judge, they mean bags suitable for heavy duty cotton balls, or maybe heavy duty pieces of Styrofoam.  Half of the makes are as see-through as the Sudanese government’s official reason for not granting a travel permit.  Shove in trash with edges, say a cardboard box or a rolled piece of carpet, and the bags split like pea pods in the summer sun.  Worse than that, they seem to split along pre-existing fault lines, splits straighter and quicker than the tear lines between two bags.

In my book, you shouldn’t have veto power at the UN Security Council if you can’t make a garbage bag that works.  And you certainly shouldn’t be flying war planes over the Falkland Islands, or menacing Syria’s dictators, or discussing the invasion of Iran.

I’m not one of those Americans who chant “USA, USA!” when an American helicopter flies over a ballpark, or thinks that American crap is any less crap than un-American crap.  But have you ever used an American garbage bag?  Maybe you’ve seen an ad for them.  A guy with pipes for arms fills one with tree branches, shards of broken window pane, maybe a little tornado-torn aluminum roofing, and then adds a box of rusty 3 inch nails.  Then they drive a Hummer over the thing, or shoot it with a concealed weapon.  Then throw in a full Encyclopedia Britannica to press the sharp bits into the plastic.  The thing won’t rip.   Not even holes.  You could carry tropical fish in it.  Or suffocate an enemy combatant being held indefinitely without trial.

That’s really all I wanted to say.  I know, this blog is supposed to be about humanitarian issues.  Apologies, my brain has been on leave for eight weeks.  So, to pull a rabbit out of a hat, here’s the moral of the story.  The presence of NGOs  in DRC or Haiti or Somalia may look like humanitarian aid, it may come in the same color and wrapping as humanitarian aid, and it may even have the same ”heavy duty” label as humanitarian aid… But that don’t make it humanitarian aid.