Always On Watch Two: Whine, Whine, Whine

This post is not another personal, whiny one as should be obvious by the accompany graphic from Google images.

Rather, this post is a reaction to this June 4, 2010 story from the Washington Post. Lengthy excerpt below the fold:

It wasn't typical fare for the neighborhood e-mail discussion group, but Jean Teichroew hoped that another Silver Spring resident might know the answer to her question: "Whose responsibility in the county is it to remove a dead chicken?"

The rust-colored, feathered corpse had been lying rear-up near an empty Heineken box at 16th Street and Second Avenue, just north of downtown Silver Spring, since late last week, Teichroew wrote on the North Woodside forum Tuesday. After it had begun to "ripen" in the heat, she wrote, she called Montgomery County's Animal Services Division but was told that officers couldn't retrieve it unless the bird was "the size of a vulture."

[...]

...A Montgomery County Council member's staff intervened and red-shirted "ambassadors" from downtown Silver Spring's Urban District were sent to pick it up....

Apparently, these citizens in Montgomery County, Maryland, felt that they required government help to get rid of a dead chicken, particularly when

Teichroew said that the chicken, which she had to pass daily on her walk to work, was "pretty disgusting."

Of course, as the dead chicken lay there day after to day, it continued to rot and reek while citizens waited for the government to take care of the matter:

Teichroew said she and her son, Peter, 24, planned to remove the chicken themselves Saturday with a bag and a pair of gloves. But when her son saw the bird's size, he told her, "Mom, that thing is huge!"

Concerned that the smelly, fly-covered corpse was a public health hazard, she asked her son to call Animal Services again. "Tell them it's really, really big," she recalled telling him. "Maybe you'll get someone who doesn't have the 'vulture rule.'"

This time, he was told that someone would be sent out. But when Teichroew walked to work Tuesday morning, the chicken was still there. She then called Montgomery's Highway Services division, but it referred her back to Animal Services and the police department's non-emergency number. When she called that, she said, she was pointed back to Animal Services and the highway division. That's when she called the office of council member Valerie Ervin (D-Silver Spring), and a staff member passed her concerns along to Rodriguez.

Finally, the local government arrived to solve the problem, that of a dead chicken, for pity's sake.

Although both the newspaper and the various involved civil servants found a lot of humor in this story, I do not.

Why in the world didn't at least one of the affected citizens glove up, don a mask, grab a shovel and a couple of heavy-duty trash bags, and take care of the matter himself (or herself, for that matter)? Not a pleasant task, to be sure, but a necessary one, unless one wants to smell decomposing animal flesh day after day. I also find amazing that the woman and her twenty-four-year-old son, both adults, wimped out from scooping up a dead chicken.

Americans have become way too reliant on the government to solve problems which citizens themselves can and should solve for themselves. Honestly, I cannot imagine my father's generation walking by a stinking animal carcass day after day and not tending to the matter themselves. Can you?

As Mark of Casting Pearls Before Swine recently opined: