Litter bugs

I was visiting my nieces in Brantford yesterday.  I decided to take them for a walk in the "little red wagon" or (green plastic as the case may be) to the grocery store.

We walked down the residential street to the sidewalk that ran along the main road.  From there is was about a 10 minute walk to the mall with the grocery store, hair cutter, gym, coffee place etc that all these generic suburban settings have.

As we walked along the pathway the surrounded the parking lot, in front of all the stores, I was blown away with the amount of litter strewn everywhere.  Receipts, coffee cups, candy wrappers etc.

I watched people get in and out of their cars, go in and out of the stores, oblivious to the fact.  Ignorant to the point that the litter was clearly just white noise to them.

We completed our little shopping trip and began the trek back home.  As we traversed the mall, I couldn't take it anymore.  I had to do my share and hopefully contribute in a little way to cleaning the place up. I bent down and picked up so rubbish and placed in the garbage can not 5 feet away.  I continued on our walk, only to find myself picking up garbage every few feet and placing it in the bins that were placed, seriously, every 10 feet or so.  There is no excuse people!

There was a garbage can beside every store entrance and yet somehow people just drop litter as they enter and exit on their way to their cars.  It doesn't take much.  Just walk the extra few feet.  In fact, this just reinforces my previous post about laziness.

What kind of example are we leaving our children.  We all laugh at how kids say the craziest things, likely from over hearing the adults around them.  It also extends to our actions.  Didn't we all learn as kids that littering was "bad"?  Why do we choose to ignore those lessons?  Or worse, teach those same lessons to our kids at home and at school and then provide a poor example.

On the remainder of our walk home I began to notice the garbage that was all along the main road.  It is one thing to casually drop a receipt on the sidewalk, not that I can excuse that behaviour, but it is something else to be driving along at 50km/h, open a window, take the last gulp out of your slurpee and jettison the extra-extra large cup out the window to join the cigarette boxes, water bottles, shoes, napkins, coffee cups etc along the roadside.

We should all be ashamed of ourselves for this behaviour.  We are fortunate enough to live in a country as vast, beautiful and largely clean as Canada.  We should not be acting like this.  You would just drop your empty coffee cup on the floor of your living room would you?  Or would you?

Take responsibility for your actions, your home, you town, your province and your country.  Clean up after yourself - it really isn't that hard.

Selfish and Lazy

March 14, 2010

One of the central tenants to humanity, in my opinion anyway, is that we are all selfish and lazy.  If didn’t have to, we’d all stay in bed watching TV eating Doritos.

The only reason we don’t do that, at least some of us, is because to varying degrees we have some sort of work ethic or aspiration or desire to be more than we are instilled in us.  Even those that are “successful” still demonstrate these intrinsic behaviours of laziness and selfishness.

Let me cite some examples.  Yesterday, I was walking down the street on a very windy day.  Outside of my local coffee shop was a gentlemen desperately trying to suck back as much of his cigarette as quickly as possible before he got too wet or cold.  As he paced back and forth he walked around a garbage can that had been knocked over in the wind.  The garbage can belonged to the coffee shop which he was frequenting.   Only interested in his nicotine fit and not at all interested in expending any extra energy he did nothing to right the can.  In fact, no one who passed it on the sidewalk did anything either.

Other examples: 

• People who bud in line
• People who don’t signal when turning corners in their car or changing lanes on the freeway
• People that litter
• People that don’t hold the elevator
• Etc

In fact, in day to day life, you can find all sorts of examples of people’s behaviour that when you think about it can be explained by these two concepts.

It takes effort, work even, to participate in the world around us.  I suppose that is why it is called work.  Getting up in the morning is work, getting dressed is work, making dinner is work. It is far easier to order pizza than to make a nutritious meal – my goodness that might involve leaving the house to go to the store to buy vegetables!  Staying fit requires work for crying out loud!  As does holing the door for someone, buying flowers, being nice etc.

Life is hard work, get used to it.