If I woke up early enough, I could see street sweepers quietly sweeping the streets of Taiwan when I was younger. They quietly collected all the garbage from the day before and dutifully tidied them into trash liners. Maybe it was because no one else wanted that kind of job, or maybe it was really tough work, the sweepers were almost exclusively elderly women or retired soldiers from the Chiang Kai-shek era. And that’s been going on for a long time.
Fast forward to my arrival to the United States. I started to notice that nobody actually sweeps in their homes in America — they vacuum. In fact, it was pretty tough to find brooms at Walmart. But cheap vacuums were everywhere. As for the outside yard work, Americans use these blowers to blow the leaves around. Is that laziness or ingenius at work? Is it that much more efficient to use gasoline to blow the leaves, dusts and garbage all the while generating polution? But then I realized that some people simply blow the trash into their neighbors’ yards. So the trash actually never gets picked up… because the next time the neighbor’s out cleaning his yard, he’s going to blow them right back!
On the industrial side, Americans have invented these huge street sweeping machines to help clean the never ending streets of America. In fact, these machines are so big and mean, if your car is ever in the way of it cleaning, you get a ticket (in humble Savannah, GA, a ticket of that sort is worth about $12; but in NYC, I think it was $65 or something rediculous like that). But the thing is, these damn machines don’t actually clean the streets either. All they do is sweeping trash from one corner of the street to the next. And a lot of times they are cleaning the streets when the traffic is the worst. Nothing’s more frustrating than to be driving behind one of those monsters. But again, I question these machines’ efficiency and usefulness. Is it really that much cheaper to purchase hordes these expensive machines, and to maintain and insure them, and then to have to hire someone and train that person to do the street cleaning? Is that an attempt to glorify what the society deems a “low paying” job (by driving a machine like that, they become “operators”, not street sweepers anymore)? Or maybe the government just doesn’t want to have to deal with the labors and the unions?
There’s probably more politics and “corporate economics” behind all this than meets the eye. But it sure makes America look all advanced and futuristic having monster machines sweeping the streets and men with blowing devices blasting dirt and leaves everywhere. Long live Land of the “Free“.
