The hill leading up to my street is a prime target for litterers. I have been appalled by the things discarded on this road. Why dump your tinsel covered Christmas tree when the town gladly picks them up outside of your house? You really can't hold on to your fast food bags until you get home? The worst was the mattress that sat there for months. Why? There are ways to get rid of trash that don't involve polluting the neighboring streets.
I'd like to blame young people, simply because I'm old and I want to blame young people for everything. (I have my prejudices, I must admit.) Having been a middle school teacher I was witness to countless acts of mindless littering. Kids constantly threw their trash on the floor or in the halls, and if you tried to get them to pick it up, they always said it wasn't theirs. Argghh!! So, I picked it up. Constantly. I thought I was being a good role model when in reality I was probably teaching them it was ok to trash the floors because the teachers or custodians would pick it up. We teachers tried to rectify the situation by taking the kids out on beautiful days to pick up the trash on the school grounds to keep it from polluting the Chesapeake Bay. They really got into it and felt satisfied about doing something to help the Bay. This was one part of their Service Learning Project. I like to think it made a direct impact on those kids.
I pick up a lot of trash in front of my house, snack food paper dumped by the kids walking home from the bus. It annoys the hell out of me, but I don't say anything just to keep the peace. The other day, my lawn mower guy and I were chatting on my front steps when a van with two young women drove by and tossed their trash out of the window and on to my driveway. I jumped up yelling, "Yo bitch" while simultaneously shocking the heck out of the lawn guy who always thought I was a mild-mannered retired schoolmarm. What did she rip up and throw out of the window? A picture lovingly drawn by a child as a gift for one of them. That made both of us even angrier. I remember when my friend Dottie got married. One of her chores the morning of the wedding was to go to the church and scoop up the litter on the church grounds. Once I asked a young man why he threw his fast food bags out of the cab of his truck. He replied that he took great pride in his truck and didn't want to mess it up.
Oy vay.
I know there are other people as disturbed as I am by this trash trend. When he was in better health, my neighbor Herb would walk the streets and pick up trash along the way. Some group actually bagged the trash on the hill leading to my street. I don't know when the bags will ever get collected, and now people driving up the hill are throwing their trash on top of the bags, but they tried. There is a group of volunteers who meet regularly in Havre de Grace to collect and properly dispose of litter. And the more prisoners on work detail detrashing our streets the better! (Well, I don't know if the prisoner example actually counts as people caring about our environment, but they work really hard and do a good job.)
The big question is how to get people to care. I grew up with the single tear sliding down the weathered old face of an Indian mourning the pollution of his land. (Yeah, yeah. I know he wasn't a real Native American, but he was a good actor). No way could I throw a piece of paper on the ground without being haunted by his tear-stained countenance. What has changed? Why do people trash their environments so easily? Where's the remorse? Where's the responsibility? Where's the common sense?
I hear you Barbara. But I am ready to throw in the towel. Every week I sort out my garbage and put my recycle in one can and my waste in the other. And two weeks out of three the Baltimore County garbage me either ignore or refuse to pick up my recycle. This week I had one can with paper and boxes and the second can with plastic bottles and glass. They took the paper and boxes. Then took the lid off my plastic and bottles and left them on the curb. I need to the Indian to come shed a tear on Friday mornings and make them take my trash.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in the Army we were REQUIRED to "police" the area. That meant "pick up the trash". However, in reality it meant pickup the CIGARETTE butts. WHY I wanted to know were the smokers permitted to discard them on the ground in the first place? And why did the non-smokers have to help pick them up? Far too many people assume the trash is someone else's problem.
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