Those of you following New York City news know that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has rescinded recycling in the city for everything but cans and paper. I haven't been unable to recycle since before Pasadena adopted the practice, which must have been before I entered junior high, and it's filling me with a strange panic. Tonight I went to take out the trash and reluctantly threw the bag of empties in the regular can. I think about the size of the bag, and where all that stuff goes, and how it's not going to go away, ever. And I know I'm not going to see it, so all my waste is just going to build up like problems you have with your boss that you don't talk about. *cough*

I don't want to be responsible for that. I'm not the best when it comes to other everyday leftist things; I don't use compact fluourescent bulbs; I'm generally a pretty poor vegetarian; I eat lots of non-organically-grown produce; and I use tampons, the bleached kind. But I do recycle, reflexively; I even go out of my way to do it. And having my ability to take care of my waste hindered by the government makes me angry like the militias: I want to excercise my constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness unmarred by the worry that I am taking more than my share of the world's resources and using them to make big piles of crap. I'm tired of fighting my government about these things. I'd become a conscientious tax-objector if it wasn't so likely to fuck up your life.

There's a very obvious campaign in this: get together with a few local environmental groups, the active ones from Hunt's Point and Williamsburg/Greenpoint, say; have the neighbors collect their recyclables for a week, and hire a truck to dump them in front of the Mayor's house; call a huge press conference to point out that this house-high pile is just a week's worth, and remind people that this is only what goes to the dump from one neighborhood in the course of a week, just imagine what we do in a year. It's a very visual issue.

However, I do not read the local news, so I didn't have my head up about this one, not to mention the fact that I don't have good connections with those environmental groups. This news hook is going to expire very quickly in waves of red-alerts for the Fourth, and by the time this even reaches my site, which won't happen for a while since it's messed up, any hope of changing this series of events will have passed.

I'm so fscking disorganized. Posted by Gus at July 01, 2002 02:09 PM | TrackBack