Secure Garbage

Ever notice how government buildings tend to be in close (relative) proximity to one another? In most larger cities, it seems, you get these little areas where a dozen or so government office buildings are all huddled together being eyesores and a blight on property values. I recently had cause to go walking through one of these valleys of darkness and despair, en route from a place to a bus stop (gas is $4 a gallon! I heart public transit!), and noticed, again, the complete and utter lack of garbage cans outside these edifices of institutionalism. I didn’t notice this just because I’m, you know, really observant - I had a candy bar wrapper I wanted to throw away. Garbage cans; they’re never there when you need them.

Around government buildings, the lack of garbage cans is more than just Murphy’s doing. Someone, somewhere, once placed a bomb in a public garbage can and killed a bunch of people. Never mind that this happened on the other side of the world, in a public place, way back in the dark ages when “bombs” were “bombs” (and not “improvised explosive devices”); garbage cans’ potential danger was found to outweigh their functional use as litter receptacles. (Never mind, too, why anyone at, say, the Department of Natural Resources has cause to fear being the victim of a garbage can-bomb; paranoia trumps reason every day.)

In some ways, that’s fine and dandy, I guess. Maybe government employees generate less garbage than the rest of us; who knows. What I do know is that large masses of people do generate huge amounts of trash; after Barack Obama’s appearance here in Saint Paul a few weeks ago, every garbage can downtown was not just overflowing, but the center of a sloping pile of garbage deposited there by the teeming hordes. Clearly, events which draw large crowds - like the RNC convention in September - should require larger-than-normal numbers of garbage cans to accommodate the needs of those crowds. I suspect that exactly the opposite is going to happen - come the first week in September, it’ll be harder to find a garbage can downtown than a grocery store, or a business that’s open after five. (Note to people from Minneapolis, and other distant, rural lands: That was an inside joke, for us metropolitan Saint Paulites.)

Remember, garbage cans aren’t handy receptacles for civic-spirited patriots to deposit their environmentally-conscious recyclable waste in; rather, they’re actually conveniently-located IED receptacles for the throngs of al Qaeda operatives who, as anyone who watches the news or reads the paper will of course be all too painfully aware, have been blowing up garbage cans in public spaces all over this great country on a literally daily basis for years now. (Me, I think the garbage men - excuse me, sanitation engineers are in on the whole thing. Just think: Garbage men! They come - they creep! - they sneak around town in the wee hours of the morning, when honest men and women are still sound asleep. They empty, but do they also fill?)

So, yeah. If the current level of baseless terror paranoia continues, public garbage cans are going to become even rarer than actual phone booths. (Remember phone booths?) And if the streets are covered with trash, remember - your local city government isn’t to blame; they’re just trying to protect you from al Qaeda. Aren’t filth, stench, and ugliness a small price to pay for freedom, security, and liberty? We may all succumb to disease and infection, but by God, we will have gone down fighting, and will not have let the terrorists win!

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