Random 2013 Platform Goals 3: Clean is the new Green.

Here's an idea for the future: Garbage cans. Like football's John Madden, I've diagrammed it so clearly that even Dave Matthews might grasp the utter simplicity.

So long as the city is packed to the brim with serial litterers, it just might make sense to strive for a reduction in trash by giving all of us cleaner sorts a few places to put the fast food containers when we're out walking and see them on the ground, although perhaps the first task is to convince the remainder of the populace that there is such a thing as walking.

Now, I'm purposefully lobbing this in the direction of Keep New Albany Clean and Green, apparently now a semi-official arm of local government, one making it possible for exurbanites to wag their fingers at the wretched urban folks -- you know, the White Countian's Burden.

KNAC&G seems enamored of beautifying prevailing symptoms rather than treating the disease, which is fine, but while periodic mass clean-ups are wonderful and necessary, wouldn't it be more meaningful to at least try and direct some of the garbage into receptacles before it hits the ground, or is deposited into those nice planters on selected street corners?

For that, we'll need trash receptacles, of which there are far too few downtown. They may need emptying every now and then, too, if that's not asking too much.

Maybe such a preventative clean-up crusade would be a better way of hectoring the Board of Works on a weekly basis than strategic flower placement, but what do I know, except that if there had been a trash can nearby this morning, I'd have placed the Big Gulp in it.

Maybe that's just too much micro-thinking for New Albany, where we're as far North as the Deep South ever gets. If so, I'm sure the linoleum lizards will let me know.