Editor:

All I want my government to do is protect me, deliver my mail and collect my trash. Is that asking too much?

When I was growing up in Connecticut, once a week the garbage man came into our yard with a container on his back and dumped our weekly garbage into it, maggots and all. It was a dirty job but a good service. In St Louis, where I lived in the '80s, the mailman wore a tie and a cap and delivered our mail, which he carried in a leather bag, to our door, on foot, twice a day. In Los Angeles, where I lived for 17 years before moving here, the trash men came into our yard, took our trash and dumped it into a truck each week and replaced the cans in our yard.

When I moved to Brentwood, I was required to buggy-lug the trash cans to the street and place them three feet apart from the recyclables, to be picked up by a trash man who sits comfortably in the cab of his truck while a robotic arm grabs the cans and dumps them.

Today, our trash man stopped his truck, got out of it, and wrote me a citation for overloading my recyclable blue can and affixed it to my barrel, then left the overload trash on the street. It contained my wife's old wedding dress with lots of fluffy crinoline.

Mr. Government, I pay taxes and a special monthly fee for your trash services. You work for me. I don't work for you. Do you understand?

Ron Beatty

Brentwood