Unabashed

Today when I was driving home from work I was stopped at the red light at the interstate on-ramp, and saw a man in a car next to me roll his window down halfway and throw out a napkin. Then he fired up a cigarette and sat there, pompously tapping his steering wheel to whatever Mariah Carey song happened to be playing. For a second, I thought about getting out of my truck, walking over and throwing that bit of trash right back into his car, right into his face. But the light changed, and I drove on, and so did he.

I’m sure I’m going to reflect on that moment quite a bit, maybe even for the rest of my life. I still remember one time about ten years ago that I witnessed a co-worker throwing trash out of the window of the work truck we were in, and laughing about it. I’m not perfect, I’ve done dumb things in my life, but it seems to me there should come a time when we should make a choice about how we’re going to live, especially when it means bettering the world we live in. Strewn garbage isn’t just bad for the environment, it’s bad for image, too, and I don’t want to live in squalor, especially when it would have cost the guy no time at all to put the napkin in the seat beside him and put it in the trash when he got home. I won’t even get started about landfills and the excess of waste already in this country, but you could at least put the trash into a trash can, right?

Would it have made a difference if I’d confronted him about his littering ways? Probably not. It would have just led to a confrontation between two people with radically different viewpoints. One who gives a damn, and one who doesn’t. It’s hard for me not to wish bad things upon the heads of people like that, especially knowing what we know about what we’re doing to the world.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: litter, litterbug, trash