Tulsa Trash Cart Plan Brings Out the Fruits and Nuts

Oh no! Tulsa's Big Bad Tulsa Government is watching your new trash cart. Even worse, Big Bad will be forcing you to—heavens!—recycle. 

Or maybe all of this is just made up by a bunch of paranoid people who have been listening to way too much talk radio.

For those of you keeping score at home, we're referring to changes proposed by the city's Trash Board to buy new trash carts, which could be tracked by radio-frequency-identification tags. This would allow the city to better monitor the pick-up service, officials explained.

Ah, but the city's zanies have figured out that this is a double-super-secret plan by Big Brother (and probably the CIA!) to invade our privacy! And make us do horrible things like recycle! And these folks are steamed.

Councilor Blake Ewing, quoted in the Tulsa World, said he's heard the radio ID carts called "a repressive, punitive, elitist, big government, nanny state, environmnetal, fascist recycling regime."

Whew!

Oh wait. How exactly will these new trash carts do all these horrible things? That's not clear. In fact, neither the city nor the trash board nor a new trash cart in your yard would seem capable of doing any of these things.

But to some among us, any attempt to change anything is obviously an effort by Big Bad to turn us into slaves of the power-mad, out-of-control bureaucrats. Or something.

By the way, you think any of these folks have heard of Google Earth, which has a picture of your house on the Internet for the entire world—including terrorists—to see?