Dear Editor:
The good is bad we don’t do. The rake needed no improvements; how has a leaf blower improved our lives?
As of the last few months, an attempt to bring the annoyance, pollution, and degradation of the quality of life and sense of community by leaf-blowers to the Council has been ignored. Councilman Musella stated to me “privately” he could never support such a Resolution to phase out leaf-blowers for better alternatives available. The better being battery-powered rather than 2-cycle black-carbon polluting and noise-making in excessive 90-100 decibels.
At the last Council meeting, Councilman Justin Musella had to have his own words back in his mouth; “He could never support such a resolution because it was government interfering with business.” It is ok for businesses to interfere with our health, well-being, privacy, and sense of community. He says he is for the community; what he means in his rhetoric is he cares and supports business over the community, no matter the impacts or outcome.
Sensible Human-beings are not perfectionists but Meliorists. They believe in trying or making things better by putting things right and improving them when they do not work well enough.
Some things have to be the best they can be; Medical procedures, airline journeys, and maintaining the security of bank accounts; because of what is at stake.
Here with the lawn industry, the stakes are Human Health and well-being, a sense of community violated, disturbing the peace, invasion of privacy through the noise and air pollution, and continuing anti-ecological industry that does more harm than good in quality of life and ecological sense. Why would a person or a Council be against such a Resolution supporting such proposed legislation as A6238 or S4273?
In close-quarter neighborhoods like Lake Hiawatha, and many suburban places, these blowers are especially offensive, other factors like acoustic properties of home locations. The randomness of one blower being used (after enduring mower noise) and then another, from another property, at another period leaves peace and quite near impossible for long, arbitrary on any given day. (During the recent past summer drought, when grass shuts-down it, growth landscapers were cutting the lawns as usual, despite the lack of ecological sense or need, for their fees).
Even in areas like Parks and Natural Areas, Pyramid Mountain, Wildcat Ridge, and others, the setting is disturbed by these noise creators and air pollution devices.
Many towns and places have finally come to the limits of tolerance in realizing the obvious negative impacts of this unhealthy intrusive industry. The Green here is the money, not any sense or science of ecology. To reject a resolution to improve an industry through available new and better tools is merely a slap in the face of the community and environmental health in favor of business or the common good.
I am pro-free market which has, for the better part of human history, always improved the lives of all people. Competition makes us better. Justin Musella.
Nothing can be further from the truth. Competition wastes energy and resources and has not been the catalyst for better human cooperation, or we would never have gotten this far. Progress is another word for pollution and has improved the lives of some, not most. At present, our economy exists outside the laws of nature. It is unsustainable and promotes endless growth, an impossibility. The competition also leads to a monopoly as one puts the other out of business. Free Market is also an illusion and a deception.
Never in the history of democratic societies has the populace been more removed from the decision-making process than it is today. Our Collective Global future is being made behind closed doors by trade representatives-appointed officials with the blessing of amorphous, transnational corporations. Our Constitution has been hijacked and keeps proving it’s a flawed document; “we the people matter little,” as does science or ecological sustainability. Above all, corporations’ rights and profits are responsible for the present demise of the Republic and any hope of democracy or equitable justice.
Lawn culture is a self-centered anti-community annoyance we are made to suffer, as it encourages life in a vacuum as if no one else exists at the time, and that the impacts of air pollution, noise pollution, and injury to mother earth are sanctioned somehow by private property and individual rights, which puts private property opposed to community and environment itself!
No economic interest should ever be placed above the reverence for life, but that is what we have in a free market. The recent train wreck resulted in free market deregulation, as its cargo of Vinyl chloride is used to make even more plastics, not less has spread harm and sickness; as we see the plastics about us everywhere, that citizens is the free market, making our lives better? Not only is vinyl chloride used in plastic production, it also requires mercury. Cancer, one would suppose, is spread by free-market products made with vinyl chloride and mercury.
The opposite side of progress is pollution from man-made chemicals that don’t exist in nature. The pollution outcome of progress has long ago brought an unsustainable scale of waste, which costs and affects us, not the corporate efficient cause that produces it; they pass off the negative to others, which is another free-market downside. Plastics are the most obvious example of free market delusions of the outcome.
Free Markets are the opposite of free people, and the sanction of corporations are people or better and above people. Free Market is the economy not serving people, but people the economy, a return to the plantation model of the master-slave paradigm.
It appears our present town council is a Chamber of Commerce on steroids. If you are not in business or a Fortune 500, you don’t count. The council has no checks or balances against this. Not supporting this resolution concerning progress in better lawn equipment, specifically leaf-blowers, is shameful.
Nicholas Homyak
Lake Hiawatha
