Pack It Out
I live in a community where I sometimes doubt community pride. I walk to my office most days and often witness people’s lazyness. My trek takes me in front of Hartnell College. People often have lunch in their cars and instead of holding onto their trash until a trash can becomes available, they simply leave the trash in the gutter. These are adults… who make poor choices. I cannot fathom to think what sorts of choices they make in college and in their everyday lives.
On that happy note: Happy Day Before Earth Day… (of course, everyday is earth day).
brig,
I have to disagree with you in part.Littering or busing ones trash is not a choice so much as a habit.
Today a guy walking in front of me stuffed some rubbish into someone’s hedge, which immediately fell out. He looked right at it as it fell, too. And then he had his hand down his trousers for about five minutes before deciding to relieve himself all over a wall. It was a thin walled pass too so I had to step right over it. Delightful.
To be fair though, if where you live is anything like like here, there’s only one bin every six million thousand miles. The council wanted to install more but there was a petition stopping because they were ‘ugly’. Really? And the piles of garbage don’t?
There’s a primitive (no facilities, no fee, not maintained) camping area I like to visit, which some people mess up at times. There must be others like me who clean it though, because it’s usually in pretty good shape despite that. On the other hand, Earth Day is just annoying.
I used to maintain a small boatyard/ marina. We had one family who would take all of their bagged trash and throw it off of the back of their boat. Of course the tide and wind would send it right to our fuel dock, where I would fish it out, atatch a strongly worded note to it, and put it back onto their boat.
As a kid, and then later as a leader, when we went camping or backpacking, we always left the place cleaner than when we found it. (And left a neat stack of firewood for whomever next camped there.)
One year we took a bunch of kids down to a lively park in Delaware, and when the time came for the site to be cleaned up, it had been kept so spotless by others (and by us), none of use could find anything to pick up. *sigh* I could stand for that happening more often! 🙂
Beetles… yes, but habits start with CHOOSING. I choose to make this a habit. Lazyness, I suppose, is an indirect way to a habit. Hmmm.
Dave… this saddens me. At the bus stops here in Salinas, there are no trash bins. This seems stupid to me. Much like the “ugly” of trash bins… why not hire artists to paint them then?
Rat… because it is ONE day out of the year?
squid… GAH! Good going on the note and REtrashing from whence it came.
Pete… this is a nice reassurance that some people care.
We have a sticker that is around here on the West Coast done by a local artist… it says: Pack your trash… and it has cartoon people coming from the beach packing their trash.
Oops. Yeah… Earth day being annoying? It’s because that’s another day when lots of people get preachy and/or try to collect money. Sadly, I respond poorly to self-righteous people, and have been known to (falsely) tell them I’ve flushed a can of used crank-case oil down the toilet to celebrate Earth Day… We all have our little quirks.
A Rat… No, it’s understandable. I, and many others, are guilty of the Earth Day observance thing… If you are gonna spout Earth Day at folks… be prepared to live it. I love the bumper sticker that says: When you throw something away, where it “away.”