This Makes Me Sick

This note today from "Ed" in Windsor Park make me fucking sick to my stomach:

I have noticed an increase in people going around the neighborhood
removing aluminum cans from people's recycling bins. Today someone came
and took mine as well!

I understand these are difficult times we live in, and people are
trying to make ends meet, but I feel like they are stealing from me.

These cans I recycle are not only to do a small part for the
environment, but I think also help subsidise the costs associated with
the trash and recycling pickup. I would imagine the recycling company
makes a small profit from the items they recycle, helping offset the
pickup costs. Surely they take this into consideration when they bid
the contracts.

I know I could collect them and other metals and turn them into the
recycling people myself and make some money, but I don't own a pickup
or large area of land to store metals until I have enough to pay for
gas dropping it off. I don't think my immediate neighbors would approve
either.

Perhaps when the new bins come everything will not be as accessable to
these bandits.

Bandits! Bandits! Stealing what probably amounts to a dollar or two in aluminum. Granted, I don't know how many aluminum cans Ed leaves behind, but let's be generous and say it's not many. But my god, to treat a couple aluminum cans as some sort of loss, as some sort of affront to his property -- all I can say is, I hope Ed gives heartily at church, not because I think the church allocates his money any better, but because I'm sure he's taken to heart his pastor's big fat sermons about charity and the love for your fellow man.

When our old school Democrats, who love to wave the names of Molly Ivins and John Henry Faulk like flags when it suits their own cause, scream like shrill little misers because they've been taken with property value paranoia (say it shrilly: "we're being dumped upon!") , and when others gripe that others who have it worse than they do are picking through their trash to make a living, that's when you know you're living in a mean, pathetic little fucking world. I expect these sorts of attitudes from others. I don't expect it from people in my neighborhood.

Update: Last night after writing this I had a dream in which I had been elected to some WP neighborhood position. My first thought was, I'm going to have to take down that post. Second was, I can lead the neighborhood from Maine.

This morning someone else posted to the listserv about the can thing, and as it was not in my dream, it made me feel some hope for the WP, and for humankind in general:

When I see people taking the aluminum cans, I pray.