Cycling

One of the rituals of the new religion, and religion it is, don't kid yourself, is of course recycling. Not cycling, as I mistyped, thinking perhaps of the album Tour de France by Kraftwerk, but recycling. Everyone must do it and we all do it. Like people in poor countries where every empty bottle is treasured and reused. Pretty soon we'll be making musical instruments out of empty oil drums and cardboard boxes. The Chinese don't do it but the Americans must. Admit that you don't recycle, and soon you'll find yourself without friends, even penalized at work, perhaps.

The holy ritual is well organized, as befits a mature church. The city provides us with blue plastic boxes, whose manufacture, everyone conveniently forgets, must have contributed to the hellish global warming, boxes in which to place the sorted recyclables, bottles, cans, cardboard, whatever else is considered recyclable, before placing them at the curb on the weekly garbage pickup day. Newspapers are to be bundled and tied and placed on the sidewalk. A truck with the driver sitting on the right hand side arrives, stops at every house on the block, and collects these items, emptying the blue boxes into large bins in the back.

But. Ah, yes. But before the truck gets there on the garbage pickup day, or sometimes the next day, the private individual recyclers arrive at night and collect some or all of your recyclables. These private recyclers are most often the homeless pushing noisy shopping carts overflowing with large plastic garbage bags filled with bottles and crushed cans. Or they are Chinese or in any case Southest Asian grandmothers driving up in four door sedans of recent make and filling their trunks with the recyclables. The private recyclers take their loot to a recycling center and sell it for some small amounts of money. No one seems to mind them, except the city, but the city won't do anything to stop them. (Their collecting activities are illegal, by the way.)

Another recycling activity has been in the news lately. There are many free newspapers and magazines available from street corner boxes. Some are newsweeklies with a hysterically leftist bent, others advertising bulletins,, yet others thick New Age magazines filled with ads from psychics and healers, and announcements of various classes in New Age rituals, faiths and exercises, that are all guaranteed to make you happy at last. (This last topic is a category in itself, and one of these days, I'll bring you a review of New Age press.)

Well, the free newspapers have been disappearing from the boxes around town. The publishers have been alarmed, complaining to the authorities, their advertisers, including the New Age healers, an unhappy lot. What happened? Unlike during the last mayoral election, when the candidate of the Left picked up and threw away a newspaper with an editorial opposing him, and got away with it, this time it was the recyclers. But not the grandmas and not the homeless, for whom stealing free newspapers would not pay, but people with pickup trucks driving around town, emptying the free newspaper boxes and transporting their loot a a recycling center where they'd get, guess how much for it. Gasoline costs about three and a half dollars a gallon these days, how much would these thieves be getting for the newsprint to make it worthwhile? They get all of six American cents per one pound of paper! Now, of course, the recycling centers, like the stolen car chopping garages, deny that they would ever accept tainted merchandise, in this case, newspapers with the current date on the front page. And so it goes with recycling, not cycling.