Trego's Mountain Ear

I think Pogo was supposed to be an opossum.  He definitely didn’t look like an opossum, so I may be incorrect – but Pogo was a comic strip in the first third of my lifespan.  Probably his finest moment was in this panel:

Pogo said it first: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  Nine words.  Eight of them with only one syllable.  The panel above showed up on the first Earth Day.

Obviously, Pogo’s Okefenokee Swamp was suffering from uncontrolled garbage dumping.

Here, we’re looking at running out of landfill area down Libby way in the next couple of years – and the narrative is that the problem is that Evergreen raised their garbage hauling rates, so the solution is cutting down the days people can fill the green boxes. 

Creating a single landfill in Libby was a poor solution to a problem that occurred 30 years ago.  And it was a problem that came out of the county health department . . . but it got the department a larger budget.  Simply enough, that counts as 30 years of bureaucratic success – and we’re only looking at one failure.  The thing is the solution – most people realize that they create garbage seven days a week, and that filling the green boxes three days a week won’t reduce the amount of garbage.

In Lincoln County, we rarely hire the best and brightest.  Those that we do can find promotions by moving to different locations.  Those who are left behind advance within their fiefs and find solutions to problems their predecessors created.  If I remember correctly, the single landfill solution came up on Ron Anderson’s watch – and he’s older than I and has been retired longer. 

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”  It isn’t enough to just raise cane when a midwit cuts dumping to three days a week.  Politics affects all of us – but as taxpayers the elected officials have been unable to build a firewall that keeps our county department heads from building their own little fiefs. 

Success, to a bureaucrat who is in charge of a mini-fief, amounts to putting the final crisis off until the week after his or her retirement.  Right now, on garbage, the big problem is that the landfill in Libby is almost full.  The narrative is that the garbage haulers got greedy.  The proposed solution is to cut down access to the green boxes to three days per week.