I know that, what with this recent trend of the green movement, what I’m going to say to you is going to seem radical along that line, it’s going to make me seem like some tree-hugger, but I think people shouldn’t litter.
I don’t know what it is about the idea of littering-I guess it’s the sheer laziness of the act-but I cannot stand to see garbage where garbage doesn’t belong. Surprisingly, that includes a great many locations.
Particularly parks. Not that parks are special and deserve special treatment (I want you to know that I care for all locations equally and would never want to make one feel different from the other); it’s just that most of the people that go there are kids; it’s just that parks are some of the last places we can go without having to deal with gross things.
Usually. Recently, I visited Hart Park. If any of you have been there lately, it’s been very green out there, what with the relatively wet weather.
It’s beautiful over there, the hills and mountains that are usually gray and brown are a vibrant, welcoming green.
Unfortunately, while the rain was able to wash away the monotonous backdrop of the park, it was unable to wash away all of the litter that had collected there.
I suppose a sociologist would find everything there fascinating-a wide array of Styrofoam cups and cardboard food containers, all of which characterize our Bakersfield tradition of fast food consuming-but I’m not a sociologist, so I just found it gross.
An offshoot of the river, or at least some part of the park that contained a small stream, was filled so entirely with mucky, tepid water that the sight of it alone was enough to make me want to leave. It was only accented by the fact that a large collection of trash sat at the end of it.
I stood there looking down at it thinking of ways that people could fish it out-with the same nets that people use in pools to remove leaves, or maybe one big net to scoop it all out at once.
I wondered, “Who’s responsible for cleaning this up?” Obviously, it was someone’s responsibility. Someone was paid to either maintain the park or, even more specifically, clean up the messes that people made.
But then I realized that this line of thought was incorrect entirely. I was sitting there wondering about the people who were supposed to clean up the mess when the real problem should have been those that created the mess.
I asked myself why people did it. I knew that there were very few, if any, people who would think to themselves, “I’m going to throw this trash on the ground just to ruin someone’s day!” Or, at least, that’s what I’d like to hope.
It had to be, again, the factor of laziness. Only laziness could possess a person to just up and leave one’s garbage wherever one went.
Unless leaving trash is some way of marking one’s territory-then I guess there’s something else to it .
What makes people so lazy? Is it the very same food, the food that sheds the containers that these people leave behind, that makes someone lazy?
Do these people get so fat from the fatty foods that they eat that they can’t spare the energy required to get up, walk an extra fifteen yards to the nearest trashcan and throw it away?
At my high school, we had to have trashcans every ten feet to make sure there wasn’t a significant litter problem. To make sure that people didn’t just throw the trash on the ground, we had to make sure that people never had to walk very far at all.
What’s worse to look at-garbage or garbage cans?
The saddest thing of all, for all our solutions, all our gimmicks to prevent people from throwing things on the ground and just leave it there, the easiest, quickest fix would be for people to just stop being so lazy.