Litter

Driving through town, and especially walking, I can’t get used to seeing litter lying about. The municipality tries to do what they can about it, but it keeps on coming. It is hard to regulate, hard to control, and it’s pervasive. For years I have struggled with this notion that if there are laws against littering then things would get better. I used to think that people would want to have their properties looking nice and would take care of things like clearing the trash from their front sidewalks.

Then, suddenly the other day I came upon a thought. Perhaps people just don’t know how to pick up the litter. So maybe we have to teach people how to do it. Just maybe we don’t have to have all these laws perhaps people don’t understand how to bend over and using their fingers to pick up that burger wrapper on the sidewalk. Perhaps they just don’t understand the concept. Maybe they don’t think people can perform that kind of movement.

Perhaps we have to tell people that humans can actually do that action. People have with muscles in the lower half of our bodies that allow them to bend the upper torso forward so that their hands are closer to their feet. In this position, one can use their fingers to grasp something that is on the ground and then reverse that movement and raise the lower half of our bodies upright and place that item that was on the ground in a trash receptacle.

All my life I just thought that people just didn’t care. Now I know it’s because they don’t know how to bend over. Geez, what a revelation!