Complete Garbage

If you were sitting in your living room eating a candy bar, would you ever simply reach over, open up a window, and throw the wrapper outside onto the ground? What about if you were at a friend’s house? I’m sure that in all but the most extreme cases the answer would be no way. Very few people could imagine being so blatantly lazy and showing such lack of respect. Therefore, I am at a complete loss when I try and comprehend why some people think nothing of rolling down their car window and letting the highway wind take their trash to the side of the road to sit and rot. As far as I know a lot of the roads that we drive on are paid for and kept up with our tax dollars, so this should be upsetting to all of us. Effectively, you are throwing garbage in your own back yard, only the one you hardly spend any time in.

Driving on 696 in some areas is almost like someone has blazed a trail through a trash dump. On both sides of the road are decorations of cups, bags, cartons, cans, bottles and plenty of other eyesores that someone just couldn’t bare to look at anymore while they were driving and had to get rid of. “No, I just can’t make it to my house even though I have a garbage can there.” Either that, or for some reason some people just don’t think about how inappropriate this activity is.

As humans, we do enough job of altering the landscape that mother earth designed. I am not a complete opponent of progress although I think we could use a little discipline in the pursuit of it. If we are going to build roads and destroy natural habitats, we could at least keep it clean after we do so. Besides the actual soiling of the places we all have to inhabit, there are some other issues here as well.

After all, what does it say about you if you think it is alright to throw your garbage wherever you please? There seems to be some issue with size of ego for one. How important to you have to feel to think that you are privileged enough to not have to clean up after yourself? No one follows you around at your house and picks up things you toss aside as you walk through it do they? I wonder how many people consider this: eventually someone is probably going to have to pick that thing up. Instead of the effort it would take to throw it away yourself you have created a need for someone to walk along the side of a road and bend over to pick up your waste. Why should anyone ever have to do that?

Or maybe it is an issue of pride, specifically, a lack of any pride in your city, state, country, and planet. We should feel grateful to live in such a great country, and could at least show our gratitude about it by not throwing miscellaneous junk out of the window on our way to or from work. I cannot recall where I read this quote or maybe even the exact wording, but the message should be clear; “I should hate to tread upon this earth and to not leave it a better place for it.”