I am sick and tired of all the junk that works its way into my life. In my younger years my parents couldn’t afford a television so I had no idea about the commercials enticing viewers to buy their products. Then someone came up with a brilliant idea (for themselves) and presto, Slim Whitman made a fortune. Please, I am not knocking Slim but the only reason I knew of him was the fact that one of the tours during my military career was with the British Army. Slim was always popular with the English and sold 120 million albums and yet many Americans don’t have a clue as to he was. So was born the era of the infomercial and Americans went gaga over crap, or should I just say junk?

There are many forms of junk I can complain about like all the darn cigarette boxes, Dunkin Donuts cups and numerous pieces of McDonald’s packaging that lands on my 60-foot frontage on Route 202 in Windham. What really irks me is the amount of cans and bottles that land on my property that some idiot tossed out of a vehicle while passing by. Are these people so stupid or so rich that they can afford to toss money away? The truly sad part is that there are people so desperate for money that they either walk, bike or drive along Windham’s roads just to pick up bottles and cans so that they can cash them for in 5 cents apiece. I feel like I should have the option to return all the junk on my lawn to the company that created it in the first place. In that case, a Happy Meal would indeed make me happy, too. As a matter of fact, maybe that’s why many residences in Windham never have a Windham trash bag on the day trash is picked up in their neighborhood.

As our society has progressed (a sore subject for some), so, too, has junk progressed into our lives. Take junk mail for instance, although the United States Postal Service would prefer to it being called bulk mail. Perhaps two of the worst kinds are applications from credit card companies who don’t care what your credit score is and from politicians who don’t care because our tax dollars paid for it in the franking first place. If someone on the progressive side of politics wants to prosecute them for decimating our trees, please feel free to do so. I buy what I want to buy. I always have and always will. I don’t need dozens of credit cards and I will never need to purchase 99 percent of the junk that I receive in my mail. I guess what I am trying to say is that 1 percent of junk is useful to me.

Then there is Spam. I ate so much Spam when I was a kid that I don’t even want to see another can of it the rest of my life. Nowadays, Spam is something different although if one really thinks about it, the Spam on our computers is truly nothing more than someone dumping their worthless calories onto our hard drives. It’s relentless but then again what else can we expect from idiots that believe they can trick us into buying their junk. What’s even worse is that some of Spam e-mails are nothing more than a scam in order to suck all of the money out of your bank account and then that becomes junk.

But when I think of junk that I must get rid of, why doesn’t Windham have a transfer station that includes bulky waste and other things? Is it because our town manager also sits on the board of ecoMaine? We also seem to have the most expensive pay-as-you-throw trash bags to put our junk into. The proposed budget in Windham includes increasing the cost of those bags. But then again, Windham is a town that allows its councilors to advertise their junk during council meetings. And that is truly junk.

Lane Hiltunen, of Windham, wonders why we don’t have concrete leadership in Windham.