Should we care about the environmental problems that would result from the diversion of Great Neck's sewage wastes to Wantagh and Seaford on the South Shore? Of what concern is it to the people in Great Neck if our desire to upgrade our unpleasant rundown East Shore Road area would cause stress, harm, and environmental damage to people in neighboring and distant communities of Nassau County?

Are we obliged to consider the health and welfare of others when we take steps to improve ourselves and our environmental habitats? Is it ethical, as civilized humans (especially us in Great Neck) aspire to be - is it fair, is it proper, is it appropriate - to dump our smelly, unsightly, unwanted sewage wastes on others who have as much aversion to and as little stomach for raw, foul fecal wastes as we do?

The Village of Great Neck proposes to beautify its East Shore Road area along Manhasset Bay by closing two perfectly adequate sewage treatment plants that have been operating there successfully for decades, and by demolishing the existing oil storage tanks located nearby which it claims to be an eyesore. The village wants the many millions of gallons of raw fecal sewage that is currently being handled here each day on Great Neck's North Shore, to be shipped eastward through new large sewer pipelines called sewer mains, which would have to be constructed, across Nassau County's North Shore from Great Neck to Roslyn.

From there, the raw untreated sewage would be sent down to the South Shore to be treated and disposed of by another sewage treatment plant which is located in Seaford and Wantagh within Nassau County's Cedar Creek Park. Even assuming that our fellow South Shore citizens would welcome receiving our Great Neck sewage wastes, the village's plan would necessitate digging trenches and installing new sewer mains presumably along Northern Boulevard through the Miracle Mile shopping areas, and through other existing community thoroughfares between Great Neck and Roslyn.

The impact of constructing new sewer mains through existing business and residential areas would be colossal and devastating. These areas are already crowded with shoppers and travelers heading to destinations both east and west through the major roadways that would have to be dug up.

Traffic, already insufferably dreadful in rush hours (which are at present extending to longer and longer periods as more and more cars and trucks come on the road in the area), would be horribly tied up in nightmarish frustrating delays for years as the new sewer lines were being constructed. And the traffic diversions that will be entailed would send noisy cars and belching trucks with pollution-laden exhausts careening through quiet residential streets where children play, strollers walk, and mothers wheel baby carriages safely and unconcerned about the dangers that might come from heavy traffic diverted through their now peaceful areas.

Either the authorities in Great Neck just don't give a damn, or they consider the people living on the South Shore to be lower class than those on the North Shore, or maybe Wantaghians and Seafordians are dumber and stupider than we are, uncaring brutish louts, who would not mind the environmental degradation that our exported high-class sewage might bring.

In either case, if we approve of what the Village of Great Neck is trying to do with its sewage wastes, we are not behaving like the good, civilized, upstanding, honorable, ethical human beings that we assume we are. Civilized people do not deal with their problems by foisting them on others.