Life is pockmarked with an array of puzzling incongruities. Among them is the fact that we actively recruit volunteers from among our ranks to spend their weekends bagging up roadside trash — trash discarded by litterbugs who also come from among our ranks.
A relative few carelessly violate norms. The rest of us are left to clean up after them, as if they were 3-year-olds still in the potty-training stage.
Fall is nearly here, the most beautiful of all the seasons, and the most walkable. It’s a great time to reinforce one of life’s eternal dictums: Tossing litter out your car window is moronic.
Look, I really dislike a lot of things in life. A handful of things — online bullying, yardwork, writing “your” instead of “you’re,” people who use the f-word in public and men who can wear skinny jeans — really, really irk me. But few behaviors chafe me as much as the careless, idiotic act of littering.
Why’s it so infuriating?
I dunno. Aside from letting loose the occasional handful of empty sunflower seed hulls on long drives along open highways years ago, I can honestly say that, as an adult, I’ve never littered. Something about my internal moral compass just won’t allow me to throw out as much as a crumpled-up straw wrapper, probably more biodegradable than those sunflower hulls I used to toss back in my sunflower seed-eating days.
Lest you think this is a humblebrag, rest assured that my own life dossier has plenty of stains on it. And I’m no tree-hugger. But if you offered me $1,000 in cash to toss my empty Starbucks chai latte cup out my car window, I wouldn’t even vaguely consider it. (Starbucks customers must share my proclivity; I never, ever see trash from Starbucks on my walks or cycling forays into the country. Bud Light and Pepsi drinkers, on the other hand, are the absolute worst.) I can’t bear to do it, and can’t bear to see others do it, either.
I took notes on my cell phone about what I saw during a recent walk down a rural road near my house. There was a discarded Little Caesars pizza box. A diaper. Quite a few empty blue Bud Light bottles. Three empty Styrofoam serving cups — presumably from an ice-cream run — one with the spoon still inside. Discarded potato chip and Doritos bags. An empty Modelo can. A half-full bottle of Mtn Dew Code Red. More fast food bags than I could keep track of. Dozens of empty, flattened beer cans. At least a half-dozen large drink cups, the kind you buy at convenience stores; some still had lids and straws intact. A shirt sleeve. Empty take-out containers.
That was just in the first half-mile.
Littering is a Class 3 misdemeanor here in N.C. Intentionally littering less than 15 pounds gets you a fine of up to $1,000 and 24 hours of community service. In other words, it’s against the law.
But so is speeding, many folks must reason; plus, it’s OK so long as you don’t get caught and you’re not reckless, right?
I’m sure that wasn’t on the mind of the people who threw out all the beer bottles on the road near my neighborhood. They were solving a dilemma: they certainly didn’t want to get stopped with an open container of alcohol. That’d be real trouble. Much easier just to chuck ‘em out the window and let them be someone else’s problem, right? Simple. Fix two problems with a single throw (and break not one, but two, laws in the process).
I also can’t imagine the idiocy and lack of compunction in tossing the remnants of a bagged takeout meal on a roadway, either, instead of waiting until you got home.
Alas, it happens. A lot. How much trash are we talking about? In North Carolina, about a million pounds of trash is collected in our Adopt-A-Highway programs, on average, each month. That probably puts the uncollected volume at at least another million or two pounds per month.
We don’t just need more people like me who hate seeing it. We just need more of the rest of you to be respectful — and responsible for your garbage.
Please. Otherwise, you’re garbage.
Read CityView Magazine’s “Fall in Fayetteville” September 2024 e-edition here.
