Pick It Up

Now that it is spring and the warm weather is coming on, there are more and more people out and about.  A result of this is that there is more and more trash on the streets in my town.  Littering is my one and biggest pet peeve.  People who litter make me madder than a hornet but I am afraid to say anything to them for fear of getting shot.  I frankly don’t understand why people leave their trash lying on my sidewalk and it gets me so mad everything I see it.  I have been known to shout out expletive deletes and call people names when picking up other people’s candy wrappers, cigarette packs, and even crumpled up paper towels from my front walk. 

As usual when I am struggling for an answer I turn to Google.  I searched under the phrase “why people litter” and found some sites of interest.  The first hit was a site in Arizona about litter called Don’t Trash Arizona.  They basically concluded that people litter intentionally.  According to them the most common demographic who litters are single men 18-34.  That fits in my situation because those are the people I see walking down the sidewalk in front of my house.  Also, apparently they don’t consider candy wrappers and cigarette butts litter. I suppose from a sociological standpoint these people feel justified in throwing their trash on people’s lawns because they are oppressed.  Okay, maybe that’s pushing it, but think about it. If people think they are put upon by society maybe they are likely to say “F it”, and drop their trash because they want to anger others.  Letting someone else clean up after them makes them feel important.  I subscribe to you it’s not too far-fetched a reason.

So maybe that’s a better approach.  Give these people jobs.  Give them a reason to be happy with the community they live in.  Help them to feel worthwhile.  In affluent areas where there are higher levels of education and pride there is far less litter so to me that’s a possible answer.  It’s a much harder situation to address but a better reason than nothing so I am sticking to it.

Be Part of the Solution

I read a comment in the 2 cents column of the Times Herald by a guy named Jerry who was complaining about the trash behind the Bandshell at the Elmwood Park.  His last comment whined about why no one is doing anything about it.  I felt like calling I a rebuttal for that comment like “well Jerry instead of complaining about having someone else do it, why don’t you do it?”  I didn't frankly because I kept forgetting to call, but it really annoys me that people think like that.

Jerry should be part of the solution.  If he is tired of the trash in that area, maybe he should bend over and pick it up.  Or maybe he should grab a group of his friends and schedule a clean-up of the area.  Who does he expect to clean it up anyway?  He is the same kind of person who probably has trash lying around the front of his property and won’t pick it up because he didn’t put it there.  This kind of thinking is pervasive in this town.  Everyone is expecting someone else to do the work and they just sit around an complain about it. As a result nothing gets done.

So be part of the solution.  If you see something wrong then fix it or get a group of people together to help you fix it.  Enlist the help of the administration to point you in the right direction if you don’t know how to do it.  There are plenty of community groups in the town that work on stuff like that and would be more than glad to have another helping hand in the work they do.  People are too quick to just point their finger and place the blame and the solution on someone else.  It has caused a downgrade in our community.

The Great Non-Cleanup

Several weeks ago, we got a flyer in the door. It was advertising a cleanup of our block for the Great American Cleanup supposedly part of the Keep America Beautiful program that was to have happened on Earth Day (4/22) with a rain date of Saturday. My husband and I work very hard to keep the litter at bay on our property and there are some like minded people, but by and large most people on the block are pretty oblivious to the litter on their yards. As such, we when we got this flyer we were immediately skeptical of the intentions.

He placed a call to the phone number on the flyer and was told that the cleanup was being organized by the mother who lives in Philadelphia of a woman who lives across the street. Ironically enough the woman across the street is in one of the worst kept homes on the block. My husband indicated that Friday was a workday for him (which it turned out not to be) and it was not likely that we would be able to participate, to which the woman remarked, “well maybe next year”. Maybe next year?

Saturday weather was good and we glanced out the front door at varying intervals and saw about two people putting some leaves in a bag. They did police up some of the trash, but generally we saw no change on the block otherwise.

The thing about cleanups is that they have to be done every day. That is one of the responsibilities of home ownership.  Why wait until you need a dumpster to be brought over to the block when you can clean up a few candy wrappers or paper plates that irresponsible people just drop as they walk down the street when it happens? Oh, that’s right. I forgot. People don’t know how to bend over.

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!