Allitterating Litterature on – Litter?

Litter. I don’t understand litter. But whether I understand it or not, it is apparently still a problem. As I re-discovered last week.

My recent rediscovery came in the drive-through line in a local fast foodery. I was behind a man in a gray late-model sedan. He got to the window to receive his order and was handed his drink and a straw. His first action was to remove the paper wrapping from his straw and pitch it out of his window onto the surface of the parking lot.

I will confess that my initial reaction was one that began with “What the . . . . ” and I will let the reader finish the phrase. There are several options, and any of them might have approximated what was in my mind. My next thought was to remember an old story from my youth.

One of the guys my mother dated for a time after my parents’ divorce was a fellow named Bob. Bob was a great guy, probably my favorite of any of the men who were interested in her. As a young man, Bob had been an officer in the Navy, and possibly in Naval Intelligence (I no loner remember). As a middle-aged guy, Bob was head of security for the local office of a large company. Bob was no Neanderthal, but he was an imposing guy when he wanted to be.

Bob was walking across the parking lot on his way to work one morning when a young guy dropping his girlfriend off for her job tossed some waste paper out of his car window onto the ground. This irritated Bob, and he walked to the open window, looked squarely at the guy and simply said “Pick it up.” After the younger man saw that Bob meant business, he opened his door and picked up his trash, as he warned Bob that he was going to “go wild” when he finished. Bob stood right there and the young man evidently thought better about “going wild”, and left.

So, with that story in my distant memory, it is understandable that I might have an urge to get out of my car and tell the guy in the sedan to “pick it up”. But I am not now and have never been a large and imposing guy, and we are in an era when you never know if the response will be a pistol instead of a threat to go wild. So I stayed in my car and kept my mouth shut. But I did not understand why anyone would do such a thing.

I am of an age that remembers when throwing trash out of your car window was kind of normal. There were many public service ads made about litter. I still remember slogans like “every litter bit hurts” . . .

. . . and the visual of the Indian (Iron Eyes Cody, if memory serves) with a tear in his eye after seeing a despoiled modern world. I was raised to throw my trash in a waste basket or a trash can. But from the number of times I have picked others’ items of trash from my front lawn, it appears that not everyone has gotten the memo.

So, is this just about a literal lunkhead lobbing litter into a lot? And does that instance of alliteration turn this tale into litterature? Don’t answer that. But do us all a favor – the next time you get some trash in your hand, find a place to keep it until you get to a trash receptacle. Everyone should strive to be an illitterate.

28 thoughts on “Allitterating Litterature on – Litter?”

  1. Littering drives me crazy as (warning!) you may be about to tell. Littering shows one to have a small, lazy mind and an infuriating amount of arrogance.

    While I won’t say it at any other website I may happen to frequent, but my job is as the district maintenance engineer for some state DOT. The amount of money spent statewide picking up and disposing of litter (by contract, inmates, volunteers, or full-time employees) is generally in the $5M to $8M per year range. Sadly, this litter isn’t just straw wrappers either; there are fire extinguishers, mattresses, couches, large appliances, heads from engines, dirty magazines, firearms, and plastic soda bottles – that people have urinated into and thrown out their window (which those mowing dread encountering). I even once saw somebody’s prosthetic leg. And that is before we even contemplate homeless encampments. There have also been instances of tires being dumped from commercial entities. Then, some trash haulers are less diligent than others in regard to covering loads so refuse will blow out for miles before the turnoff to the landfill.

    The only fun I’ve ever had with litter was once driving a Chevrolet Silverado over a fresh roll of bubble wrap. That sounded like a WWII movie soundtrack. 

    A couple months ago we were in an affluent urban area on the Kansas side of the KC metro area. It was unseasonably warm that day. In front of me, and in the lane to my right, was a guy in a BMW, windows down, moonroof open. As we are going along at 35 mph, he ejects his abundant Starbucks refuse through the moonroof – so the guy directly behind could have it smack his car. 

    Your alliteration here is truly quite good. Somehow I’ve only succeeded at elaboration, bloviation, and frustration. Hopefully this does not lead to your readers evacuation.   

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    • That was very educational. I never realized what kind of horrible stuff the slobs are throwing out onto the highway. (The pee bottles–ugh!) Where’s that crying Indian when you need him?

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    • It truly is amazing what (and how) people dispose of things. I live on a street that some use as a cut-through, and I am sure I pick up a piece or two of trash from my front yard every couple of lawn mowings. I can only imagine the problem at a state-wide level.

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  2. I never get it. I’ve got to be within a few years of you J.P., and in my life, it was never acceptable to toss trash out a car window. Even growing up in Chicago in the 50’s, my Mom caught me tossing trash on the ground and made me go back and pick it up until I could find a trash can. This is part of the whole de-evolution of society, as far as I’m concerned. There seemed to be less littering in my life 30 years ago than today, but there also seemed to be a more educated, and larger, middle class than there is today as well. My current apartment situation has large dumpsters for regular trash and recycling; and I’ve seen people get out of their cars, throw trash on the parking lot ground near their cars, even messy food trash, and walk by the dumpsters to go in! Unfortunately, I’m too old to get into a fight about this with them, and guns are too easily drawn in my city over lesser crimes than this! I fear that the de-evolution has made me financially unable to live with the type of people, sociologically, I want to live with. It going to be a sad 20 or so years until I die.

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    • Andy’s comment about his Mom reminded me of my stint in the Boy Scouts, and how we always “policed” the area we camped in before we headed out on the hike back to civilization. The goal was to make it look like no one had ever been there. Because of that experience, it’s hard for me to walk by a piece of trash without picking it up and disposing of it.

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  3. A few months ago, I was at a busy traffic stop, waiting for the light to turn green. There was a man waiting to walk on the other side, he was drinking a soda. In a blink of an eye, he finished the soda, crushed the can and threw it in the middle of the intersection. I could not believe my eyes!! Did he REALLY do what I just saw??!! There was nothing to do about it with heavy traffic… but I thought, this wasn’t just about littering, it was a total disregard for anything in life, that is the message I felt. So, people who litter weren’t taught to care about anything. It’s very sad, because it goes back to their upbringing.

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    • Economists have examined this phenomenon – people who abuse public property. “Not my problem” seems to sum up the attitude of those who come from a background that is evidently more coarse than mine was. It is like the three kinds of people in grocery store parking lots – the ones who take their empty cart to the cart corral, the ones who will take other peoples’ empty carts back to the cart corral, and those who unload their groceries and only move the cart enough so they can leave their parking place. That third group irritates me too.

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  4. The “Crying Indian” ad which aired in the early ’70s deeply affected me as a kid. I wrote about this experience in an article published in the County College of Morris newspaper, February 13th, 2019. 

    How much money has the government and the Ad Council spent on these public relations efforts to try to stop people from littering? Has it made any difference?

    Ironically, in my town the litter problem increases on Recycling Day (if it’s windy!) The wind blows people’s stuff all over, and I suspect little of it gets picked up.

    Say what you want about North Korea; the streets of Pyongyang are spotless!

    Here’s my article. You can click on the image to enlarge it:

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/147108383@N02/53664684964/in/dateposted/

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    • That was an interesting article. I agree that when it comes to ugliness, it is in the eye of the beholder, and I always liked seeing oil company signs and such. But trash on the ground is something else. And I am sure it is worse now – in the late 1960s, I’ll bet most trash was relatively degradable compared to the many kinds of plastic and Styrofoam packaging in use today. And with the glass pop bottles and newspapers, anyone who went to the effort to pick them up could at least collect a little money for them.

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  5. I remember being saddened and perplexed by the weeping Indian commercial as a kid. We just didn’t have that kind of litter where I lived, how could that happen?

    Now I regularly drive a commuter highway to work, and am amazed by the distribution of trash in the median. It’s like thousands leave for Toronto in the morning, eat breakfast in the car, and chuck the garbage out at the same place each day.

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  6. I like the word “illitterate” that you have coined JP and it irritates me too, especially when a garbage can is right next to where people throw their trash around. I got to the Park the other morning. We had 80-degree temps the day before. In the pavilion area, the contents of fast food was strewn all over the picnic tables, the cement floor and there are two large garbage inches, not even feet, away.

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  7. We have more mindless acts in today’s world than ever (like the guy who set himself on fire in NYC yesterday, sigh…) Littering seems like one of the “classics”; been around for decades and remains a head-scratcher. I’d love to point to “lazy” as the excuse but I think it’s deeper than that; an attitude of “don’t care” or “doesn’t matter”. I can’t claim to have seen many people in the act but the evidence is so clear in the rural areas we chose to call home. Fast-food bags and cups. Couches. Sadly, you can even include domestic animals. We rescued one (and saw many more) stray dogs in our neighborhood that were clearly “discarded” without a care for what happened to them after.

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  8. What a waste of taxpayer money to have to clean all this up, as Jason alluded to. Or property management companies in mall parking lots.

    These inconsiderate souls just have no thought process that makes any sense as they drop their coffee cups and cigarette butts out of their cars. Highway exits are strewn with refuse at the off ramps. It is shameful.

    I guess the mantra “Rules are for other people” applies for them, along with those certain makes of cars where turn signals remain untouched.

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  9. Here in Pennsylvania community groups can “adopt” a stretch of highway. That means they agree to clean up the litter and other objects along a specified stretch of road on a quarterly basis. It’s amazing how much litter and just plain junk accumulate along our highways, and in the median strip, between these clean-ups. I would never think of just tossing garbage out the window, but many people have no problem with doing just that. Apparently people no longer take pride in their communities.

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    • Your comment reminds me that many days, I pass through neighborhoods that are not attractive and where I know nobody. I, of course, have no pride in those parts of my city. But I would never think about dumping trash out of my window, even in those areas. It seems that the Golden Rule of treating others as I would want to be treated is no longer being taught.

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  10. I remember my dad quoting the slogan, “Stash that trash in a wayside barrel!” My wife believes and taught our kids that littering is a sin. I don’t litter although I don’t go quite as far as that. But really, how hard is it to pick up after yourself? Or in the case of the lunkhead, there’s a little spot to put it somewhere, I’m sure. You’re right though about it being best not to create a confrontation which may or may not end well.

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  11. I probably anger people when I flaunt certain conventions and rules but I have a strong negative visceral reaction when I see littering. I would rather trash the inside of my car than litter. Your post generated some interesting comments.

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  12. I’m catching up on the last several weeks of your blog posts. During the pandemic, I picked up the hobby of going to parks or trails around Indy a couple of times a week and picking up trash using a bucket and grabber. I still do this now, although these days I’ve reduced this to once a week on the Monon between 86th and 96th street. I work with a volunteer from Keep Indianapolis Beautiful most of the time when I pick up trash, and together I’d like to think we do a decent job keeping that stretch of the Monon clean.

    In the years I have been picking up trash, I have come to better understand the variety of ways in which litter happens.

    Some is from standard fare, inconsiderate people who really don’t care what happens to trash as long as it’s no longer in their car or on their person. Statistically speaking, I don’t think these people are a high percentage of the population, but it also doesn’t take very many of them to cause a mess. An arguable subset of this population are people who suffer from some sort of addiction. They smoke or drink and then toss their bottles / cans / cigarette buds wherever on the ground so they can grab the next bottle / can / cigarette (someone who actively walks the Monon where I clean appears to have an especial fondness for Early Times Kentucky Whiskey).

    Other litter comes from people who aren’t so much inconsiderate as they are negligent. They lose tissues or food wrappers on the ground without, perhaps, realizing it; or they leave things to the side of the Monon with the intention of coming back for them but then never do (a lot of people seem to do this with water bottles).

    Still other litter comes from improper storage of trash. Trash cans that aren’t properly sealed can result in the wind blowing trash out or animals hauling trash out and scattering it on the ground. Similarly, trash bags sometimes fall from vehicles and make a mess.

    Lastly, there’s “well-meaning” litter. These are people who put flyers or similar material up that then eventually fall to the ground. Until recently, someone insisted on putting Positive Mental Health stickers along fences on the Monon that inevitably resulted in several dozen stickers being scattered on the ground.

    As a bonus, here are some of the most interesting things i’ve found on the Monon: $60 cash (ripped up but accepted by the bank!), a TV with a built-in DVD player, a Communist Party newspaper, and an X-Wing Star Wars toy.

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