Attack of the Eco-Stasi Cardboard Police

Caldwell’s new Politburo isn’t wasting any time imposing their nanny state ideology on us Kulaks. This past Sunday night, like every other Sunday night in the 22 years I’ve lived in this town, I put my garbage cans out by the curb before hitting the hay. And when I arrived home from work on Monday night I fully expected to see 3 empty garbage cans ready to be brought back up the driveway.

Not this time. Only one can was empty, the other 2 stood there, full of trash, ignored by the garbage men.

OK, maybe they were in a hurry, and forgot to grab the other 2, I said. So I left them there, and refilled the 3rd can on Wednesday night for Thursday’s pickup.

As it turns out I happened to be upstairs near a window when the garbage truck came around the bend. And I watched as the garbage man walked over to my 3 cans, rummaged through each one, opening the trash bags and peering inside them one by one, before leaving all 3 of them sitting, un-emptied, by the curb.

“What fresh Hell is this?”, I exclaimed.

My wife was on her way out to run an errand. She said she’d catch up to them and ask what the problem was.

And they told her. In no uncertain terms. “There’s cardboard in your garbage. We aren’t allowed to take cardboard.”

The garbage men are now the Cardboard Police. They search the trash for errant shoe boxes. Yes, we had disposed of empty shoe boxes, which is apparently now a crime in Mayor John Kelley’s Peoples Republic of Caldwell. Put shoe boxes in the trash? Your garbage won’t get picked up.

I’m living in a Kurt Schlichter novel.

My wife told them she’d fish out the shoe boxes. The guys said they’d swing on back and take the rest of our, for the moment, approved garbage.

And to think for this I pay $16,000 a year in property taxes.

Does anybody here need some empty shoe boxes? I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to do with them now. Maybe I’ll burn them in the fireplace, a sacrifice to Mother Gaia, to appease the Eco Stasi. Cardboard, it’s Public Enemy Number One in the new Woke Caldwell Borough.

Sigh.