Great sanitation debate of '05 unlikely to have legs, but makes for hot copy while it lasts.

This will come as old news to those readers who’ve been looking elsewhere in the blogosphere, and rightly so, for breaking events in what will be remembered by our grandchildren as the great sanitation debate of ’05, but Mayor James Garner’s proposal to contract garbage pick-up and recycling to a private firm has unleashed more than a few subliminal furies in the hearts and minds of the citizenry.

The ones who are on line, that is, and the friends and immediate families of the dozen or so workers who stand to be affected most by the changeover, but beyond them, vast legions of the city’s residents remain supremely indifferent, not caring a jot who does the deed so long as their garbage disappears, thus making this issue no different from most of the others we’ve discussed here, to wit: Out of 40,000 on board, only a handful are paying attention.

Consequently, if you’re waiting for a typically irreverent and, with luck, provocative assessment of New Albany’s Sanitation Nation crisis, look elsewhere.

But first … a few thoughts.

It seemingly took all of five minutes for the great sanitation debate to devolve into the very same scenario witnessed so many times before hereabouts, wherein the very same troglodytes hurl the very same lame epithets at their perceived enemies, who are the ones trying in vain to help answer the questions demanded of them by people unwilling or unable to consider the responses, since their minds were quite made up before they began demanding the information necessary to keep their opinions the same as they were at the beginning.

Why regressives even bother asking a question when they already know the answer is a mystery to me, but so it goes. It has something to do with being able to demand facts, summarily dismissing them, then calling the messenger a son-of-a-bitch (or worse) in order to feel better about life.

Fortunately, literacy still reigns in remote corners of the community.

At her Blog, Diggin’ In the Dirt, Ann S. has posted an affectionate “thank you” that would make the late Bob “Thanks for the Memories” Hope proud.

The piece is called New Albany Sanitation Workers, This One's For You, and although I admire the sentiments expressed therein, and don’t disagree entirely with Ann’s conclusion that our redundant sanitation workers must pay for the errors of others residing above them on the governmental food chain, it still seems a bit much to lavish more words on these twelve living, albeit soon-to-be-former municipal workers than Abraham Lincoln used to remember 50,000 battlefield casualties at Gettysburg.

I join Ann in praising the work done by these men and women, and ever since the news came across the wire, it has prompted a good measure of melancholia deep within.

At the same time, the pages of a century-old New Albany city directory are filled with references to jobs and livelihoods that no longer exist, and surely paeans were composed to the last village blacksmith, the lamplighter and the fellow who steered the ferries to Louisville.

We already know that half the workers will be transferred to the street department, and that at least some of the others will join the ranks of the waste removal contractor. Nearly a cool million saved each year can be applied to repairing and upgrading the sewers, with a potential benefit to thousands of residents in the years to come.

As a progressive, it seems to me that the proposed garbage contracting deal is a sad and necessary trade-off, and hardly to be considered alongside outsourcing and the sins of big business in the pantheon of vileness.

Of course, there remains a noisy minority of naysayers who forever more will point to a thriving Scribner Place and its probable legacy, a revived downtown, as a sort of Ground Zero of the late, lamented sanitation worker, and grouse that if we hadn’t been so uppity and demanded a better city for all, the garbage packers might still be on the job.

They’ll be right in the narrowest of senses, and very wrong more broadly speaking. Most of them will have forgotten by then. So it goes. And so it always has.