Saturday, March 27, 2010

Littering

There are a few thing I pride myself on and although some of them are for the betterment of society most of them have to do with being able to spot a chick not wearing a bra from far away.
One thing I don't do is litter and people who do infuriate me.  I have raged against people who find the need to throw trash onto streets or in parks and on the sides of highways and find it ludicrous that smokers seem to find no issue with discarding of burning butts on the streets and out of car-windows when there are ashtrays everywhere.   But as strongly as I feel that I should not litter myself I also feel equally strongly that I should not feel any responsibility to pick up random street trash.

 One issue I had recently had went as follows.

I went to throw a used coffee cup into a street trash can but in my haste I missed the cylinder and the cup rolled behind it.  I went to pick it up and noticed that I had not been the only one who had shot an airball as there was a pile of trash collected behind the can..
The issue there became, if I am going to bend down to pick up my trash then why not pick up some of the other ones, I did not.    I rationalized it as follows, there are tax-payer funded jobs out there for street cleaners and since I did not want to put them out of work during this recession I would leave the other trash for them to clean.


The second issue was a big bigger, the cup I had thrown out had blown under a railing and this is where my real dilemma hit me:  can I just pick up another piece of trash as by doing so I had not added to the overall amount of trash on the floor or was I responsible to retrieve my actual piece of garbage.   Sort of like a carbon-offset for littering.
Then a third dilemma came up.  There were four or five other soda cups identical to mine and I couldn't distinguish any of them from one another, could I then just pick any one and throw that out with good conscious?



see this is why it hard being me
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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