FROM CUTLASS TO BRUSH CUTTER; FROM HEAPING TO LITTERING

March 15, 2015 | By KNews | Filed Under Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom, Source

What I am writing here may seem as if I am speaking about another place in another time. I am not speaking about another place, but I am speaking about another time.

There was a time when the Georgetown City Council was responsible for weeding your parapets and cleaning the drains. There was once a time when they did this job very effectively and efficiently. But like everything else, incompetence and mismanagement soon led to the downgrading of the services provided by the municipality.

Citizens accustomed for decades to having their drains swept twice weekly, and their parapets trimmed once monthly by the municipality, were suddenly informed that it was ratepayers’ responsibility to clean the drains and weed their parapets in front of their homes.

Now this was long before the advent of brush-cutters. Lawnmowers existed, but were reserved for use of the rich, who had extensive lawns. Not many in my neck of the woods enjoyed such fortune. Our tool of preference was called a cutlass.

In those days you cut the weeds and grass in your yard. The cut grass was placed in heaps on your parapets or on the sides of the roadway to be picked up by a trailer from the municipality which picked up such organic waste every week.

You weeded with a cutlass and most persons who did the weeding did not trim the grass. They cut it clean, leaving just soil. They then heaped up the cut material for disposal.

One day, I asked my helper to heap the grass on the parapets. He came back and said that a man, not in a suit but in a shirt-jac – the symbol of bureaucratic power in those days – had passed and remonstrated with him.

I told him not to bother with the man, since he obviously was merely advertising his new found sense of importance not being familiar that in this middle class residential area it was the practice to put your cut grass on the parapets to be picked up by the municipality trailer every week.

That practice of weekly pick-ups of cut grass has long been discontinued. That service became the victim of the financial difficulties that the municipality found itself in, in the late 1970’s.

Citizens no longer have an expectation – much less a legitimate one – that such a service will ever be provided again. As such, one runs the risk of being charged for littering if one decides to resort to heaping one’s cut grass onto the sides of the road for it to be picked up.

The same forces, but different faces, that allowed the city to decline into decay and decadence are still in control of the affairs of the city. And therefore it is worthwhile reminding ourselves that we are living in a different time from those days when one could have expected that when we placed our weeds on the sides of the roads, they would have been picked up.

Not anymore. Perhaps not ever again!