The Great Equalizer

"Out of sight, out of mind" has to be the rallying cry of those who feel the need to stuff everything on God's green earth inside a plastic bag. The topper this week was a large Christmas tree swathed - it was too big to fully enclose summit to stump - in a white plastic bag and dumped roadside on Route 114.

Is it monstrous to offer the opinion that those now omnipresent Halloween leaf bags are equally unattractive? That a tidily tied plastic diaper is scarcely less offensive than its inner offerings? That the whole notion of sanitizing organic matter by sliding it into plastic bags is far more gruesome than natural decomposition?

Slipping a Hefty bag knot and lugging a formless sack this way or that doesn't really dispatch it: Not unless we plan on landscaping some other planet entirely in green, black, and white plastic hulks. Far better to leave at least a few things in plain sight - where we can remember their origins and consider how to prevent them from coming back to haunt us.