Watkins 1
Morgan WatkinsMrs. Parkinson
English III
12 April 2016
On Dumpster Diving
Lars Eighner seemed very educated. Based on the fact that I had to look up almost ten words in the dictionary showed that. He was a Dumpster diver and he himself debunked that myth of Dumpster diving. He speaks very highly of Dumpsters, saying in the first paragraph, "Long before I began Dumpster diving I was impressed with Dumpsters" (Eighner 712). When he said this, he showed us that he was us, looking at Dumpsters, but he admired them instead of being disgusted by them. He later introduced a specific stigma that new Dumpsters, or scavengers as he liked to call them and himself, "cannot erase from their mind" (Eighner 718). This new scavengers cannot get over how gross it all is, but then, it passes with experience. True scavengers, have only a few "precious" (Eighner 720) courtesies. One of them is that they hate to have good stuff go to waste, so what they will do is set it out in plain sight for other scavengers to have, a sort of community, even when the other scavengers are competition.
The way that Eighner talked about the scavengers so highly and how intricate their lives actually were, it made us realize that Dumpster divers are actually scavengers, and they are educated and they are smart--they have to be smart--so that they can pick out what's good and what's bad. Eighner completed debunked the stigma using his tales of scavengers, but mostly using himself.
