Ya know, pigs get a bad rap. They're supposed to be slovenly, but there's a good reason they like to wallow in mud. It's protection from sunburn. (It's hard to take the cap off a tube of sunscreen when you only have hooves.)
But we live among human pigs. Every time I jump on Route 104 past the Veterans Bridge here in Rochester, I see literally tons of garbage my fellow citizens leave behind. (That's just one example.) I was parked in the lot of a very nice "strip mall" yesterday and a new car pulled up across from me. The well-dressed young man first tossed a cigarette butt out his window, and then threw a piece of paper out.
PIG!!!
He didn't want to dirty his car with his cigarette butt, but he didn't mind making that parking lot look like an ashtray. (I used to have an acquaintance who kept an immaculate house, but regularly dumped her ashtray in the parking lot of her very nice apartment complex.)
The next time you come to a stop light where there's a median, take a look out your window and you'll see hundreds of cigarette butts. The company I used to work for made "cigarette tow" -- the material that makes up cigarette filters. That stuff takes YEARS to decompose.
I don't mean to just pick on smokers, because there are plenty of considerate smokers out there, but there are plenty who aren't, too.
My cousin recently visited from England, and I shutter to think what she thought of the condition our highways. It's embarrassing.
There are litter laws in every community. Too bad not everyone obeys them.
Posts
5 comments:
Gross. Lorna, smoking is such an awful habit. I know most smokers don't mean to be invasive, but this kind of thing just drives me nuts.
Litter is one of my pet peeves. How hard is it to find a trash can, really?
I hate when I see people toss things on the streets and the litter box is right in front of their eyes.
I really, really hate littering. Listen, if you want to read a great book about a litterer who gets paid back in full, I highly recommend SICK PUPPY by Carl Hiassen. He's written a story to make all feel better about the driver in front of us busy hurling his Value Meal out the window onto the side of the road.
I do a lot of hiking, and it just amazes me that everywhere, in the deepest woods, there are always beer bottles and cans. There must be lots of people with nothing better to do than sit around in the woods drinking beer. Are they teenagers? Recreational "hunters?" I've never seen them, but the clusters of bottles are all over the place.
Post a Comment