“They’d get some garbage bags and go out to gather other people’s litter. And were mocked for it. Some even “helpfully” tossed trash out their car window right in front of them.”

 

In the late ‘70s, my family moved from the city to a distinctly rural neighborhood. We had a storybook pond out front, a dairy farm to one side and a field wildly overflowing with lupins on the other. Bucolic perfection—from a distance. Up close, you saw discarded burlap half-buried in the dirt… pop bottles and bar wrappers… car tires and beer cans… It sent my folks into a rage every time they saw it. Then they’d get some garbage bags and go out to gather other people’s litter. And were mocked for it. Some even “helpfully” tossed trash out their car window right in front of them. “Here, something else for you to pick up!” Laughing.

More than once, I heard people quasi-joke that tossing trash was job creation, a smirking nod to the then-common “make work” projects used to give people enough “stamps” to qualify for unemployment insurance.

When I complained about it to a friend, she said that people just didn’t see the mess. “We have so open space, so much unused land… we just take the environment for granted.” She wasn’t wrong. And it wasn’t just them.

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