To SC State Senator Chip Campsen
As your constituent and former Law School Classmate, I owe you the service of absolute clarity on the pending bill (H-3529) which would strip local governments of their capacity to regulate and limit plastics waste.
I have attempted to reach you by phone and used your online comment page to send you a message. I find no evidence that you have heard me. I must resort to a public challenge and raise its magnitude to whatever level necessary to command your attention. If I get no response, I intend to appearat your home and ring your doorbell, with friends, at 6 am this Sunday morning.
Update- On Friday, April 13, I rode the DASH bus to your downtown Charleston office at Aquarium Wharf to deliver a copy of this post to your secretary. She seemed tired and told me you hadn’t been there in weeks and she didn’t think you would see this. I told her I would just bring a copy by your house when I come by at dawn on Sunday morning.
If this law passes, I will end all of my personal participation any litter collection programs including Adopt-A-Highway and the CARTA bus stop clean up program. I currently clean up the West bound #40 busstop near the intersection of Shelmore Blvd. and the frontage road of Johnnie Dodds Blvd.
I will call for and help organize a strike of all community volunteers in your district currently participating in litter collection programs including those cleaning up the beaches on the Isle of Palms, surrounding waterways and the marshes along the Ben Sawyer and IOP connector roadways. There are over a dozen local organizations engaged in this endless, unrewarding work now. Based on the hundreds of angry and exhausted volunteers I saw at Mount Pleasant Town Hall Tuesday, many people will support this strike.
We recognize that the current situation is convenient to politicians like yourself who prefer to have the public engaged in unending busy work which prevents them from addressing the considerable and well documented deficiencies in the government, economy and social order of our poor, ignorant and backward state. The hours spent collecting trash from our roads and waterways are hours when citizens can’t organize an effective demand for better conditions. The volunteerism and freedom you constantly praise is really a plan to appropriate our time and energy in the service of the plastics industry and the least responsible members of our society. Our weekends are used to subsidize the greed and carelessness of others. The cost of a clean and decent civic environment is externalized to the people least deserving of paying it.
If this bill passes and is signed by the Governor, I will go out for one more trash collection morning. I will clean up a roadside of my choosing, drag the bag to the most prominent and visible location nearby and dump its entire contents there, upon which I will plant a large sign telling you to come and pick it up. I will share this on YouTube in a way interesting and visible enough for it to be seen. If I am arrested for this, I’ll try the case and call you as an adverse witness. Whatever the outcome, you can expect to seen unending public challenged to come clean up al the plastic trash I find in your district for the remainder of your legislative service.
I will not be alone in this. Many energetic young people stood in Mt. Pleasant Town Hall last Tuesday, desperate for the most modest evidence of progress. I’m sure one of them would like your desk in the statehouse. I’ll be happy to donate the time and effort I no longer spend on trash collection to that end.
We have known each other since 1982 when we sat beside each other in Charlie Randall’s Constitutional Law Class in the USC Law School. Each of us knows the other to be a man of his word. You know I’ll keep these promises.
I am now 58 years old. I have grown to feel that the options of polite discussion within the limits of Southern personal expectations are unavailing. I am no longer willing to enable the abusive neglect of your politics. I am weary of life in a state which grows ever sicker, poorer, dirtier, dumber and more expensive. I have resolved that what of a better future can be brought into this state will have to be transported here by means unpleasant and painful. No progress has ever entered the Palmetto state by any other means.
I propose nothing violent or illegal beyond a peaceful demonstration of civil disobedience. I mean you no personal insult.
I urger you to vote against this bill and to allow the Town of Mount Pleasant to implement it’s ban on single use plastic waste.
Sincerely,
William J. Hamilton, III
32 Sowell St.
Mt. Pleasant, SC 29464
wjhamilton29464@gmail.com
(843) 870-5299