Saturday, July 7, 2012

The Young and the Restless

This city breaks my heart.  Even with all its natural beauty and past splendor it is having a horror of a time trying to keep up with the rest of the world.  I have stated before how happy garbage day makes me, although it may simply be the notion or ritual involved with purging your home of its waste, but a troubling thought has recently entered my head:  what if the city's attempt at a recycling program is merely a way to reduce the waste management budget?

Think about it.  Instead of picking up our recycling like other cities, they have us cart it to easy-to-manage depots, essentially eliminating a large portion of our household trash from the garbage routes.  I have seen days where the garbage truck pulls up and the driver has to get out and put the trash into the back, then return to the driver's seat and pull up to the next house.  There is nothing efficient or safe about this, although it does seem to keep the employees from loud tirades of profanity.  Nevertheless, we can now add sanitation engineers to our resume.



Saint John is not a city where you can expect to have any measurable quality of life without owning a car, so try thinking about carting waste on the bus or by foot.

Then I started wondering what kind of market there is for the materials we are recycling which led my brain its next illuminating realisation:  maybe this stuff isn't even being recycled; perhaps it just ends up as trash anyway.

I thought about contacting Anderson Cooper or, at least, Rick Mercer, but it dawned on me that by simply putting the words in print I'll soon get an answer:  if there's truth to this, I won't hear anything; but if it's not true, the city will bring suit.

Mel Norton, the strapping young hero that felled the mighty and terrible Ivan, has Saint John swooning and basking in his eminence.  The men all want to be him and the ladies want to be with him.  I'm pretty certain I was woken from my slumber the other night by Holly tossing and passionately calling out his name, although she wants me to believe she was telling me to "move over."  The simple truth, for me, is that I have a difficult time putting my faith in a mayor who seems content with the past administration's decision to address animal management concerns by removing cats from the bylaws.

Please, young Mel, see the opportunity you have to lead this city toward a semblance of its former glory.