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To the editor:
I was driving home from the Council on Aging and ended up behind a garbage truck. I noticed that the garbage man still hung off the back, hopped down and unloaded the trash barrels by hand like he always had. I pulled over and called out to him saying I wanted to ask him a question.
He seemed a bit aggravated but came over to my car. When I queried him about why he was still emptying them himself, he begrudgingly said the new trucks wouldn’t be ready until next month. I told him that not all the people in town were in favor of the new system and I personally was concerned that it was one more automated process putting people out of work. With great frustration, he said, “I’m losing my job next month.”
I told him how sorry I was, how unfair it was, but he couldn’t say more because he had to go back to work and jumped on the truck. I drove away wanting to cry. Here I was an old white woman, living in a supposedly wealthy town, telling a black man, probably in his 30s, probably with a family to feed, that I was sorry.
The words felt empty to me, and they probably landed on him the same way. Life is unfair, but in the present, it’s being particularly unfair to people of color and immigrants. We can’t help the people losing their jobs now but looking to the future, since we have our own dump, I wondered if there was any way we could own and operate our own trash disposal service rather than paying a large outside company and needing to adhere to their process. Just a thought.
Ginny O’Brien
Garden Road
