GRASSROOTS WATCH: ZenFo Pro Joins Kinfolk, Town of Ava in Opposition to OHSWA Landfill

ROME, NY (ZP) -- I was sitting in this bar at the Beeches, this resort-type inn where I'd been boarding for the last few nights.

I couldn't sleep. I tried driving around downtown Rome, a decrepit blue-collar community where Old Milwaukee and Keystone Light billboards seem to be more prevalent than good paying jobs.

I hit a few bars around town, but still no go. Still thinking too much.

I had just spent the day learning about the systematic rape and pillage of the community of Ava at the hands of the State of New York. I had just learned the details of the molestation of some of the Empire State's most pristine countryside to make way for a landfill.

This new dump is, of course, being built by destroying wetlands and threatening wildlife, with only sheets of black plastic stapled into the ground standing between the earth and the pollutants this monstrous pit will contain.

This new dump is, of course, being built on the conscripted bones of old family farms and butting smack-dab against the Veterans' Memorial Forest, an 800-acre swath of land dedicated to the the many who've died in war to protect freedom.

I'd spent the day hearing stories from local community members who've spent more than a decade fighting it, drove past the scores of signs reading "Dump the Dump," "Protect our Children," and "Big $$ or Your Children's Future?"

I've talked to members and supporters of the Adirondack Communities Advisory League, or ACAL, viewing pictures of murky runoff, dead trout, and the effects of the bipartisan screwing of the small farmer.

For decades, New York's elected officials - on every level, from Cuomo to Clinton, from Schumer to Pataki - have failed to protect the environmental well-being of the citizens of Boonville(where The ZenFo Mom was born), West Leyden (where one of the ZenFo Cousins runs a bar), and Ava (home to numerous ZenFo Kin and where the ZenFo Grandpa is interred).

What's the lives of a few thousand rural folk, when there's elections to be won and campaign contributors to blow in NYC, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo?

And then there's the ominous-sounding Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Authority, created in 1988 to build the damned thing. (Is it jus me or does it sound kind of suspicious that three of the nine members of the OHSWA Board of Directors are retirees from defense contractor GE Aerospace?). Apparently, there doesn't seem to be any sort of governmental oversite of this agency, given the fact that they've been getting their asses kicked for almost two decades by farmers in throughout Oneida and Herkimer counties.

How does one write about the home of one's ancestors being turned into a dump?

No wonder I can't sleep.