by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
When I am out on the road on long drives, as I was two days this week, I like to keep track of oddities that I see along the way. This week as I traveled to and from the Kansas City area, across a couple of hundred miles of Missouri, the thing that caught my attention was all of the state road crews out picking up trash along the roadways. I counted six full crews of Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) personnel, all snuggled up in their reflective gear, walking next to the roads bagging trash - along with multiple MoDOT vehicles with each crew.
Two of the crews were within the city limits of Bolivar, Missouri, (population approximately 11,000) doing their environmentally friendly task on both sides and the median of four-lane Missouri Highway 13. (Bolivar is about thirty miles due north of Springfield, the home of Southwest Baptist "University" - an institution once headed by Republican politician and lobbyist Ol' Roy Blunt - and the home of Missouri's current governor-by-default, Mike Parson. Parson owns a farm somewhere nearby and I suspect it is a cattle operation because he is fluent in bull.)
The GOP majority Missouri state legislature prides itself on continually underfunding public education and social services in the state. In order to do that in as mean-spirited of a manner as possible, they must find ways to divert much of the state's revenue to things they can tolerate - like finding creative ways to get state funds into the coffers of private and religious schools, giving tax breaks to the state's richest residents, and anything else that would have minimal benefit to most Missourians in need.
So let's go pick up trash, and, if in the process it benefits the governor and his coffee shop buddies with improved property values - well, that's just gravy!
I saw all of those road crews on Thursday as I was driving toward Kansas City. Yesterday (Saturday) as I was driving home to West Plains, I encountered one more item of relevance to that story. I didn't see any road crews out picking up trash, perhaps MoDOT does not work on weekends, but I did see a roadside mess at exactly the same spot in Bolivar where I had observed state workers bagging trash two days earlier - and a couple of state highway patrolmen standing by the mess and looking very unhappy.
An old flatbed truck which had been jerry-rigged with what looked like plywood panels in order to carry trash, had lost one of its panels on the highway and scattered tufts of used pink fiberglass insulation for about a quarter-of-a-mile along the highway's grassy median. The pink fluff was everywhere, and it was going to be a bear-of-a-mess to clean up!
If Mike was in Bolivar this weekend, I'm sure he got an earful about it in the coffee shop!
(Political footnote: One state Republican who is likely to run to replace Mike Parson when he terms out as governor next year is Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, son of John. Jay lived and worked for awhile in West Plains and even married a West Plains girl. Maybe if he gets elected it will be our turn at the state money trough!)
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