"Anti-recycler wants respect from partner on trash worldview"

Oh boy...

Original column: Carolyn Hax, March 28 2024.

My take: The letter is unusually short. The LW and her partner are moving in together. He wants to recycle, she doesn’t, and they can’t work it out. She wants advice.

Carolyn responds in four words, one of which is “freaking.”

The LW tries again, requesting a more useful answer. This time she adds that her partner is “not respectful of my beliefs.”

This time Carolyn says, as if her previous answer didn’t already establish it, “I’m not respectful of your beliefs, either.”

Okay! Unfortunately, we’d better start with a brief word on recycling itself.

I personally have no position on recycling. That’s because every time I look into it, I quickly realize that it’s much more complicated than everyone lets on, especially since China stopped providing a market for our used plastics. And before you rush to classify me with people who shoot bleach into their veins, that link just now is from Columbia University’s Climate School, and it’s one of many publications on this topic.

But it really shouldn’t be necessary to talk about recycling at all, because the letter wasn’t about recycling. It was about how to resolve a conflict with a guy the LW is about to move in with. In taking a position on the conflict itself, Carolyn is letting her politics drive her advice. This is highly unprofessional (or it would be if “advice columnist” were a profession).

Carolyn’s approach would be defensible only if you put “doesn’t recycle” outside the universe of legitimate behaviors, along with, for instance, larceny, homicide, and child abuse. It’s defensible only if you equate non-recycling, as Carolyn does, with “erf the environment,” instead of classifying it as a matter about which honest, environment-loving people can disagree. Pretty crude, Carolyn! And that, if I may get cranky, is the demonization and polarization we keep reading about, which are making this country a hell-hole to live in, and taking us straight down.

There’s another aspect to this. The LW and her partner cannot even resolve an issue like recycling, yet they’re about to move in together. The LW feels that her partner doesn’t respect her beliefs! But Carolyn is so distracted by the recycling itself that she ignores the elephant in the middle of this letter, and fails to warn the LW about the iceberg she’s about to crash into (to mix metaphors). Because why help a LW who’s beyond the pale of common humanity?

Chance this letter is fake: I don’t think so, and it wouldn’t matter if it were. The problem here is the answer, not the letter.