There is so much anger in the air at the moment and so many people “flaming” everyone from the president to certain parts of the population.

I think we should all come together and choose a group to picket against — but let’s choose a group that makes sense: people who litter.

Every time I walk down my rural road on a nice spring day and see the trash lining the sides, I want to punish those people. Dirty diapers, soiled food containers, cigarette butts, oil cans, broken beer bottles. To litterers, the whole world is their garbage dump.

You wouldn’t want to hire a litterer. You couldn’t trust a person who so disrespects other people and their space. What might they do to the workplace? How would they treat their colleagues or customers? Like crap, I’m guessing.

You certainly wouldn’t want to live next to a litterer. It wouldn’t take long for the greasy car parts and old mattresses to end up on your side of the yard. Or perhaps litterers have pristine yards because they drive around all night dumping their trash along the sides of the road. Either way, your yard would be fair game.

You wouldn’t want your child to marry a litterer or have children with one. Not with people who smash beer bottles on the side of the road where children on bikes or people in cars could run over them and ruin a tire, or worse. And who knows what chemicals they toss out of their cars with the cigarette butts and diapers.

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Even being friends with litterers is risky. They are lawbreakers. Perhaps they aren’t stealing your actual wallet, but they are stealing money from your pockets. It costs taxpayers and businesses almost $11.5 billion a year to clean up litter across the country. And that’s not counting all the volunteer hours people put into cleaning up their neighborhoods.

Sure it’s against the law to litter, but that doesn’t stop anyone. We’re going to have to band together and put pressure on these people to get them to stop. In many developed countries, cultural pressures ended littering long ago. People were shamed into showing respect for the people with whom they share the neighborhood and the world, and eventually it became a habit.

We, too, need to break people’s bad habits and help them establish new ones.

I say we take down the license number of anyone we see littering and call the police, or speak to the litterer directly: “Take your trash home, we don’t want to share your garbage.” Whatever it takes, short of fisticuffs.

We can publish lists of litterers in the newspaper and on town bulletin boards. We can name names on Facebook. We can demonize litterers in movies and on television.

flaming a group that really deserves it, we can clean up the neighborhoods and make people think twice about how they treat their fellow human beings.

 


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