Dear Mr. President

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

You have done a great job of cleaning up Washington. Yes, you have had some problems with the reflecting pool, but overall Washington looks much better.

I want to challenge you to take up another cleanup cause. Might want to call it two cleanup causes.
The first one is train cars and train equipment.  

Since aerosol spray paints became available in the early 1950s, these have been the tool to desecrate trains. When I see a train that has these “decorations,” I get depressed. It feels like a contagion applied by people who don’t care.  

If one thinks about the neighborhoods through which trains pass, the people that live in houses along the tracks do not need this scenery (I lived along train tracks until I was 12).

The message this sends is that we don’t care about our country.

I have watched you, Mr. President, and you have been very effective about improving the looks of our country. Without any new laws, I think you could develop a rivalry between the railroads that would cause them to clean up these messes.

The message they are sending is they do not care what their equipment looks like. Eliminating the graffiti would go a long way toward changing the viewpoint of us all.

Part two is the graffiti on the highway signage. This one is easier for you to clean up. Recipients of federal highway funds could find their funds cut off if they don’t clean up this graffiti.

Both of these actions are not one-time actions; they are continuous from now on.

Help us get rid of our national acne, Mr. President.

***

Unrelated, Laura and I had this encounter Thursday at the Philadelphia airport. I had been in the restroom, and Laura was standing outside with my rollator, which contained a couple of small bags, and the wheelchair which I had been using.  

I sat down in the wheelchair, ready to push the rollator, and then Laura pushing me. A man came up to us and yelled at Laura for touching the push bar on the wheelchair. Turns out the wheelchair pushers are unionized and no one other than a brother in the union can touch these. One of these brothers showed up and pushed us to the vicinity of our gate.  

He took the chair from me and then asked if I would need him to come back to push me down to the plane.

I said, “No.” At that point I would have crawled down the jet bridge to the gate if necessary.  

The city of brotherly love. Yeah, right.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.