An open letter to (some) people in my town:

This is (partly) why we can't have nice things.

I spent my Saturday morning - heck, probably 75 people spent their Saturday morning - out picking up trash. Now, how many of those people generated that trash? I'd be willing to bet a big fat 0.

Because the people who go out and pick up trash tend to care about what their town looks like. And that includes not throwing your $#)(# Sonic drink cup out the window when you're done with it. Or not leaving a pile of beer bottles by the side of the road. Oh, I know - open-container law. Underage drinking. Not wanting to get caught by cops, all of that.

But it's so damn SELFISH. Especially with the fast-food crap. How hard, really, is it to keep it in your car until you arrive at home, and then put it in the trash there. Okay, maybe you don't want your spouse/parents/kid to know you've been eating it, or you're not "supposed" to eat it re: doctor's orders...but why subject the rest of us to dealing with it, then, if you have what amount to either medical-order-compliance issues or family problems?

I drove in to work this morning and the stretch of road I had picked up? Even before the Solid Waste guys came and got the SEVEN giant leaf-and-lawn size bags I FILLED picked up? Beer cartons in the street. Crumpled hamburger wrappers on the side of the road. And NO, it is not something I "missed." It was not there Saturday.

I wonder - sometimes I really think - we should just stop doing the trash pick-up days. And stop getting the trusties from the prison to come and work. And discourage Scout troops from doing pickup. And just let it go for like a year, so people can see how horrible it looks, and can realize that most trash does not decompose in any reasonable time frame.

Because I don't know otherwise how to teach people that there isn't some Trash Fairy that comes and cleans it up while they sleep, or that somehow the trash magically goes away, or that the taxpayer's dollars pay for its removal (not in my town, they don't: it's almost 100% volunteer work).

It frustrates me because sometimes it seems metaphoric of my life. Work your tail off, work hard, give up free time, make yourself sore and wear yourself out...and a couple days later, it's as if you never were.

And yeah, yeah, the ideal thing would be for the litter bugs to be caught and forced to pick up their trash plus a bunch of other trash, but enforcement here is darn near impossible and I'm not sure I want some kind of creepy police-state where citizens rat on their neighbors (because then it becomes too easy for someone to falsely rat on someone they don't like, or someone who didn't do something they asked, or those kind of things).

But it makes me mad that twice a year we all go out and do this as an organized group, and many individuals go out on a regular basis on their own time to clean up, and practically the next day it's getting bad again. (It's just like the last time I picked up the block I "adopted" - the Monday after that some jerk came through and upended some of the trash cans that were out for pickup, and it was as if I never did it.)

And I have heard of businesses who chose not to come here after viewing the town and deciding it didn't fit with their "corporate image" - and word on the street is that all the litter was part of the reason they decided.

Isn't this how the modern world works, though? A small handful of selfish people screw it up for the rest of us? And trying to get those people to change their ways is darn near impossible - so the 98% of the non-jerk population winds up having to deal with the effects of the 2% that are jerks...