NIMBY
Why are all those arrogant out-of-state
do-gooders trying to save Maine from its residents? They
have a mess to clean up in their own back
yards.
We think of the NIMBY phenomenon when people who want
something done that will alter the landscape don’t want it
in their own neighborhoods. It’s pro bono publico
– something we all want and need – but let someone else
look at that recycling facility or waste treatment plant
when they get up in the morning, not me.
It would seem anathema, then, if the something everyone
wants and needs were to clean up, preserve, and protect a
landscape, but if the loudest lovers of the landscape said
NIMBY to that.
In June, 2002, I had the pleasure, and I mean that
sincerely, of taking the train from Boston to Newport News.
The ride was comfortable and every Amtrak employee we
encountered was friendly and solicitous. The sad part was
the landscape from Boston to D.C. – an open dump all the
way within a hundred feet of the tracks. It was a steady
view of cultch: discarded furniture, tires, rags, and the
nondescript paper and plastic trash that characterizes
roadside litter. But this wasn’t mere litter. The
imagination struggles to conceive how, through mile after
“northeast corridor” metropolitan mile, the embankments
look like the old small-town dumps of New England. The very
dumps that we eventually closed throughout Maine have been
re-created in the environmentalists’ back yards.
Maybe it’s sculpture, given how ignorant I am about what’s
called modern art.
I’ve been pissed for a long time already about the
Massholes and New Yorkheads who want to rescue northern
Maine from the natives for fear we’ll turn our state over
to “development.” After innocently taking this trip, I’m
ready to insist that the Maine legislature send the next
governor a bill: No organization may lobby the legislature
about the Maine woods that takes support money from
residents of other states. From what I’ve seen firsthand,
their time, talent, and treasure is absolutely misspent on
saving Maine from itself.
Oh, the railroad right-of-way is off-limits company
property? That can’t be stopping anyone from cleaning it
up, any more than it has stopped their friends from dumping
it; northern Maine is off-limits company property too, and
that hasn’t deterred the imperial environmentalists’ foot
soldiers from tramping all over the state in order to save
it.
2002
©DamnYankee.com
