Paper or purse-take?

That'll be 25 cents.  Just for viewing this.  I want my 25 cents.

Well, it didn't take long for the eco-terrorists to invade Estes Park.  If Boulder has them, they must, by definition, be a good thing.  Please, dear reader, understand that I am very much against plastic anything - Plastic toys, plastic ring-tops on 6-packs of beer, plastic used for any part of an automobile, we are killing our sea life with excess plastic - but if I'm going to have my life monitored to the point where I'm paying extra for plastic bags, I want everyone to be in the same (plastic) boat.  This means no more manufacture of plastic toys, and any Estes Park resident caught purchasing them (for themselves, their children, their grandchildren) at Wal-Mart gets names and mugshots added to a perp-list website, as well as tacked to the library bulletin board. 

Here was their first shot across the bow, available on the estes.org mayor-and-trustee live stream:
I’m writing to see what it would take to propose the implementation of a plastic bag tax in Estes Park. Conservation and environmental awareness are very important issues to me and I would like the town to join the growing numbers of towns, counties, and states (including Boulder) to use this tax as a way to discourage from using plastic bags which, as you know, are made from fossil fuels and have an extremely slow bio degradation rate. I am proposing a .25 cent tax per bag to more strongly encourage both locals and tourists to use reusable bags. The revenue generated from this tax could be used for a variety of things though in a perfect world I’d like to see it used to fund other conservation efforts and projects. Thank you for taking the time to consider this matter and I look forward to hearing from you.

And here was my response, a short 90 minutes later, and with a secret upside-down message (I'm getting better at coverting these things):
I would like you to implement a plastic bag tax in Estes Park to the tune of $1000 per bag.  I would like you to implement a living tax on people who live longer than the current life expectancy, to the tune of $1000 per week.  I would like you to model every aspect of our town after Boulder, including a year-round university, which could be paid for by the plastic bag tax and the "you're living too long" tax.  I would also like you to implement Boulder's sugar tax, which nudges people towards drinking more bottled water, which contain plastic particles which will likely also kill them, dammit, which cuts down on our "you're living too long" tax boondoggle.  So I'm in a quandary.  Do we want people to be able to live freely up here in Estes Park, or do we wish they lived and died exactly as we live and die, and expect them to?  As always, this is sent tongue in cheek, and will only anger those too rigid to allow for differences of opinion.

If and when a plastic bag tax is implemented in Estes Park, even one that is one quarter of one cent per bag [sic, is this what the author meant?], I'll just switch to paper bags, or just carry my items out to the car (dammit, I'm still driving a non-electric car, in fact, damn the fact I'm driving any type of car, rather than just committing suicide) individually.  

All of these remaining choices are likely just as bad in someone else's eyes, so until then I'm going to keep being a shit-ass miscreant by pooping once a day and adding to the waste water and our overworked treatment plant, instead of holding it in like a drug mule.