🪴 SWANK Dispatch: The Dry Latrine Scandal — or, Why My Garden Offends the Uninformed
🗓️ 26 March 2020
Filed Under: environmental miseducation, eco-classism, aesthetic policing, colonial sanitation bias, home education interference, garden gatekeeping, social work incursion
“What you mistake for a mess is a curriculum.”
— A Mother Who Reads Steiner, Not Daily Mail
Dearest Viewer of Faecal Futures,
It seems that the mere sight of decomposing mulch and unflushed virtue is enough to summon the bureaucratic clergy of Church Folly — those disciples of the Department of Social Development, whose doctrine worships porcelain, chlorinated illusions, and short-notice condemnation.
On this sovereign date, the 26th of March, 2020, I, Polly Chromatic, located at 12 Palm Grove, penned a letter whose dignity clearly surpassed the comprehension of its addressee. Let us dissect.
🌍 I. Compost is Not a Crime, Darling
When one chooses Hügelkultur over hydroflush — a mound of intention over a pit of convenience — it appears one's intelligence becomes suspicious. Never mind that Turks and Caicos relies on desalinated water, an energy-guzzling atrocity that flushes potable hope down the loo. Never mind the biocentric and ecocentric reasoning, or that 800 gallons of fresh water are wasted monthly by standard toilets.
No, the real scandal is that my garden wasn’t finished yet — and social work prefers aesthetic completion to intellectual rigour.
📚 II. The Curriculum They Can’t Control
My children weren’t neglected.
They were being educated.
Not via tick-box worksheets, but through soil systems, microorganisms, nitrogen cycles, and—oh yes—the right to live sustainably on our own land. The garden was both pedagogical and philosophical. But the social worker didn’t bring a clipboard to learn. She came to correct.
👩🏫 III. I Am Not Available for Unannounced Judgement
Shocking though it may be to the Church Folly sect, mothers who teach are not on-call exhibits. Would they storm a classroom mid-lesson and interrogate a schoolteacher about her bins? Unlikely.
Yet that’s precisely what they did here.
Let it be stated clearly:
“I need to be treated with the same respect that you would treat a school teacher.”
Because I am one. Without the salary. Without the pension. But with the integrity.
💌 Final Note:
Unscheduled visits are not only invasive — they are pedagogically incoherent and emotionally destabilising. If you'd like to understand what we’re doing, book an appointment. Bring tea. Bring questions. Bring curiosity.
Leave the clipboard.