Columnist Susan Snyder: Compassion is lost in space

Friday, Sept. 15, 2000 | 9:29 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

The caller was one of those people some might call a fussbudget.

They figure she's the kind of person who gripes about everything. Getting around in the rushed, chaotic lifestyle that has turned our American Dream into a nightmare is harder for her. That, they figure, is why she gets so rankled over a Dumpster.

This caller was a physically disabled senior citizen. Call her what you will, but she grew weary of driving to the Goodwill retail store across from UNLV this summer and finding an industrial-size trash bin plopped on two of the parking lot's three handicap parking spaces.

University Gardens Goodwill is expanding into the space next door. The bin was for collecting refuse that workers dragged out during renovations.

She first noticed the thing in July. She last saw it about a week ago. I went over there Monday, and it was gone. Case closed. Problem solved, right?

Nope. The trash bin is gone, but the problem still exists.

Handicap parking spaces -- in this case the only two next to the store -- made a poor resting spot for the bin whether it was there three weeks, three days or three hours.

"They just didn't care," the caller said. "I went in there to ask them about it. The store manager just said, 'tsk, tsk tsk,' so I walked out."

The store worker could been more diplomatic. But Goodwill wasn't responsible for the bin, Steve Chartrand, executive director, said. The organization leases building space. It doesn't control the parking lot.

The trash bin was placed there by the private contractor that University Gardens hired to do the work, Chartrand said. He felt badly about the inconvenience.

"It was in a really bad place," he said. "We were pushing the contractor to finish work as soon as possible. It's gone now. It's never coming back."

Unfortunately the attitude that put it there lingers.

Three of the 25 spaces along the front of the strip mall are handicap spots. Two are in front of Goodwill, and the third is near the U.S. Postal Service office a few doors down.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that blocking two of a busy retail center's three handicap spots is really inconsiderate. It takes someone who isn't oblivious.

People who don't blow through society at 60 mph with a cell phone seem to move through our midst like ghosts. We reel past them as if they are silent observers to the "real" lives the rest of us lead.

It is a thoughtless attitude that permeates society with sinister ease.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I stopped for breakfast at a Decatur Boulevard restaurant. As we leaned our bicycles against a post near the window, a man standing there with a walker asked us to move them.

"That's the only space wide enough for a wheelchair to get through," he said.

Of course we moved. We never intended to block anyone's path. We simply failed to consider that some people need a wider one.

Maybe the complaining caller was simply trying to say that arrogance and indifference eventually cripple all of us.

It's not intentional. It happens one Dumpster at a time.