Stop and smell the ........ garbage?

Being recently unhorsed … if that’s even a word … I’m doing a lot of walking and using public transportation like never before. And I mean that seriously … like NEVER before. Walking through the world for really the first time as an adult is like having been near sighted for years and suddenly getting new eyeglasses that bring all the details into overwhelming, crystal, clarity. There is a staggering amount of garbage in the nooks and crannies of our world outpaced only by the astonishing amount of sputum on the ground and everywhere, even in the buildings and trains themselves – enough to fill Lake Tahoe in Sacramento alone.

As I sit at the light rail station and wait for a train I can’t help but notice the ground peppered with myriad candy wrappers and cigarette butts and shake my head and wonder why when there’s garbage cans easily accessible. Didn’t they get the “give a hoot, don’t pollute” pamphlet in grade school that I got? I mourn for today’s kids who will never know the pleasure of a summer day of bare feet on hot concrete. They’ll never know that if you walk on the white lines in a parking lot your feet won’t burn or that black asphalt is hotter than a regular sidewalk. Simple childhood pleasures denied them by an apathetic society.

We could clean up the neighborhoods a great deal if we simply eliminated plastic lids and straws. They’re laying around everywhere … and yet there’s very few cups to go with them???? To me this means no one needs lids and straws or we wouldn’t be so routinely throwing them on the ground. Do away with them! The world can more easily recover from spilled soda than it can from discarded plastic lids and straws.

Sometimes I see things that tickle my curiosity … a pair of perfectly good size 10ish boy’s jeans, a random and expensive-looking high heel, an empty wallet, a crew sock, a condom in the middle of a 6 lane boulevard???? … these feel more like crime tips to me than garbage. Is anyone paying attention?

Intriguingly, the lower the income in a neighborhood the more there is to see and be fascinated by. It would be ignorant to assume that low income people are dirtier. In each of our individual experience we have too many instances where we know that’s simply not true. For example, I was in a Safeway grocery store last year, in a “good” neighborhood and saw a white, middle class “gentlemen” of about 50 lay his finger against one side of nose, close his nostril and blow … in the middle of Safeway’s produce section … where we buy food … stuff we put in our mouth. No, low income people are not naturally dirtier. Doesn’t it rather imply that the city simply feels its funds are better spent cleaning up the nicer neighborhoods to satisfy those who pay all those bonds? When a bond issue is voted in don’t we all pay equally for it? No. We don’t. Folks on public assistance don’t pay and I think that’s why their neighborhoods and public areas are neglected. Even in the face of that, I would think it would be a city’s top priority to keep train stations and other public transit areas the cleanest – isn’t that somewhat equivalent to keeping your living room clean even when the rest of the house is a mess so you can fool company into thinking your house is clean.

Whizzing around in a car we’re moving so fast and we’re so focused on our destination that we just don’t see that we’re living in a filthy fast food garbage can.

Slow down. Take a walk and take time to smell the ……….. garbage. Because we won’t fix what we don’t see.




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