'That smell'...? Part One

'You're entitled to your own opinions...but you're not entitled to your own facts.'

Moreover, nobody is 'entitled' to muddying the waters-of-discussion by constantly returning to a downright 'terminological inextactitude', by repeatedly waiving their hands, jumping up and down and yelling...

...when it's clear they don't want to have the conversation in the first place. 

Because what results isn't a 'discussion'. It's more 'some involved parties wanting to earnestly and genuinely seek out solutions while others want to shut down the process and go back to the way it used to be'. 

There are some Hamiltonians that can't be bothered to recycle. Or process their waste. They do it begrudgingly. But given their 'druthers', they'd welcome a return to throwing everything into green bags for pickup, period. 

That world is gone. It doesn't exist anymore...and really, never should have, either. It's a remnant of a time that connects with the pretty shameful way we addressed North America as 'conquerer-colonists', and we owe it to the Earth not to continue to be such asshats half a millennium later. 

Currently, we're witnessing a quite-pathetic resistance to looking at changing our garbage pickups. When the notion of 'once-every-two-weeks' has been posited, there's –apparently– been this clamour, a bewailing cry, a keening of protest, a caterwauling befitting children denied another hour of television, not a grown-up populace. A tax-paying one, at that. 

Here's the truth, in a nutshell: Complaints have risen that, in the summer months, if we have go with garbage being picked up every other week, streets will be rife with 'smelly garbage'. Life will be intolerable over this period. 

Huh?

What garbage smells? Seriously. Organic material deteriorates. Meat. Vegetables. Fruit and the such. But this stuff isn't supposed to be put into the garbage, anyway: it's meant for your green box. (The exception would be soiled diapers. And I see no reason why we cannot come up with a solution for this, if in fact it's impossible for the parents to come up with a holdover one of their own.) Which will still be picked up every week. 

So there should be no 'smelly garbage', period. Regardless of how much time there is between pickups for garbage. 

But this isn't just a moot argument, it's an insult. It's indicative of those people who resent that Life isn't as simple as it used to be, who just want to consume what they're compelled to consume...and not have to work at the other end of the process. 

To me, the real problem, the fundamental issue isn't how often we have our 'garbage' picked up. It's how we continue to see our rights as consumers, how we see our government, how we feel about trusting our government, how we feel about 'being told' how we're going to address our personal waste. 

And the truth is that some of us continue to be incredibly selfish. We continue to be obdurate about contributing to the common good, so instead of doing the JFK 'Ask not what your country...' thing, or the Gandhi 'Be the change...' thing, we choose to mine the seemingly-bottomless 'entitlement' thing.

To be continued in Part Two.