Trash Hauling

The U.S. Park Service, and for that matter the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), doesn’t want to deal with trash anymore.

They want you to.

In back-to-back-to-back headlines in the last 24 hours, two national agencies together with developments in the area of our nation’s capital are thinking trash is your responsibility.

That’s a bunch of garbage.

Al Kamen, reporting for the Washington Post, has an article entitled “No Cans, No Trash?” wherein he describes the Park Service’s “Trash Free Parks” initiative which seeks to reduce the amount of Buffalo wings wrappers and banana peels out there in the wild among the wild animals (park inhabitants, but also park visitors) -- by removing the trash bins.

The idea is that if there’s no trash cans you can’t trash.  Can you?

Jon James, superintendent of the George Washington Memorial Parkway -- where “380 tons of trash is collected alone” -- says it’ll work because it’s simply “a mind-set shift.”

But in the town where I come from -- granted it’s not a park though it does have bears – ‘mindless-drift’ more accurately describes those drifting through and mindlessly leaving their garbage strewn behind.

Not to be outdone in the not-our-trash department, the FCC -- normally charged with the responsibility to monitor the amount of garbage littering your TV screen -- is literally in the process of adding expletives and dropping the “indecency standards” (indecency has standards?), along with dropping the pants and everything else worn by females who will, if the proposal passes, appear in “full frontal nudity even during hours when they know children will be watching.”

As recent, and as decent, as 2012 the Supreme Court reaffirmed the FCC’s authority to regulate TV “in behalf of the public interest without violating the First Amendment.”

But it is exactly here where the problem lies and the trash bin sets: “the public interest.”

The public has definitely shown it has an interest in the sex the FCC is proposing to show and sell.  Sex sells coffee and ice-cream; porn is paraded on campuses across America; and a new low – not figuratively speaking – will be evidenced in the figures pole-dancing, and other as-yet-unnamed activities, in Washington D.C.’s newest strip club where even a strip-club owner himself admitted this most recent development “is a slippery slope, because in our business you move to the lowest common denominator.”

That's slippery – not as on banana peels in national parks but – as in debauchery on America’s parkways.

Given perhaps the large volume of exposure the FCC nudity proposal has received, the deadline for expletives -- that is, what you think of them -- and the bare-it-all-before-your-children-thing, has been extended from the original date, May 20, to June 19.

The FCC’s website declares, “Tell us what you think and help shape the future.”

So tell ‘em where they can put their trash.

To share what you think -- since indeed it is your future and that of your children -- here’s an FCC link.