slug: editorial 8/13      oyster bay
            
            ItÕs Time to Take Out the Garbage
            
            Every few years we need a reminder that the town needs to be cleaned up. Somehow people forget that when it drops someone else has to pick it up, if they donÕt. 
            Presently there are not enough refuse containers in the hamlet. The Oyster Bay Chamber of Commerce asked the Town Supervisor to supply them to the hamlet. They were informed that the practice of the town is to have the local chamber of commerce provide them.
            That has been done many times by the chamber. The problem is they get destroyed and sometimes stolen. They have to be replaced over and over again. 
            They are once again doing that and it costs a great deal of money. Thousands of dollars have been spent over the past few years to address the issue.
            The town only removes the trash twice a week. Maybe that is not enough in a commercial area. 
            Now, unfortunately, when it comes to refuse, if it drops in front of your house, you automatically pick it up. You know possession is nine-tenths of the law. Somehow when trash is left on the street, no one wants to claim it.
            Last week a Bayville resident was relating a story about a fallen tree. He said an insurance company told a neighbor that where the tree falls, so falls the insurance claim. ItÕs the same thing with garbage.
            Unfortunately if someone else has been rude enough to drop something in front of a commercial property, it is the ownerÕs responsibility to pick it up. It must be part of the great law of Perception vs. Reality that dominates society: peopleÕs perception of reality has more validity than reality itself! 
            The issue is, we have to be responsible for the garbage we see littering the streets. Here is your permission to pick it up and put it into a receptacle, and not to pass it by as someone elseÕs job. Mostly I notice that people try to put things into garbage receptacles. When they are overflowing, they try to leave then next to it or in the closest thing that resembles a receptacle: that is why the flower planters are often used as garbage collectors. 
            This is a messy editorial. There are a lot of loose threads hanging about - but that is the whole issue of garbage. It doesnÕt go away, it keeps being generated and we as humans have to dig in and do something about it over and over again.
            By the way, in speaking of garbage: I told a quilt artist, who is an art teacher from Syracuse about Ōtin can art.Ķ Do you remember it? It was taking soda cans, crushed by car wheels and rusting along the road, and painting them with faces and making fun found art. I realized they are no longer easy to find. We have changed the way we handle soda cans. We recycle them. 
            As soon as we find ways to recycle the other items of garbage we toss out daily, weÕll be able to stop complaining about the trash. There really is a creative way to end the problem. LetÕs find one fast! -DFK