I’ve never understood people who just straight throw trash out of their car windows. Yet, I see it happen all the time.
Recently, I was at one of those convenience store/gas stations, and as I pulled up to the pump I noticed a truck that was parked right near the entrance. Again, the truck was parked – near the door of the establishment… which had two big-a garbage cans on either side of the door. Whoever was in that truck, however, chose to throw piece of garbage after piece of garbage out of their window. Then the person on the passenger side opened their door, I guess to give themselves more room to – you guessed it – dump more trash onto the ground.
Why in the absolute hell were these folk throwing empty chip bags and plastic soda bottles and candy wrappers and God knows what else, onto the ground when they were less than a four-second walk away from the pair of garbage cans?
That madness happened at a spot on Westheimer. But as egregious as that was, what I really, really don’t get is when folk trash their own neighborhood.
A few years ago, while I was teaching class, we were discussing the importance of honoring one’s community and treating it with respect; seeing your neighborhood as a reflection of yourself. And during our discussion, I mentioned to the students my pet peeve of seeing people throw trash out of their moving cars instead of simply waiting until they arrived at wherever the hell they were headed and throwing away their trash there.
Then, one of my students volunteered, “I’ll be honest, I do that all the time. I hate trash in my car.”
“Do you do that while rolling through your own neighborhood?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” he replied. “I can’t stand trash in my ride.”
Man, if I could have failed that brother for that, I would have [not really, but I never looked at him the same].
I mean, I’m nowhere near perfect, but I can’t see myself trashing my neighborhood, my street, my home. Those are all extensions of me. How I feel about myself is reflected in how I feel about those people and places I love and care about.
And I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. Houston City Councilmember Tarsha Jackson regularly coordinates community cleanups, getting residents of her district to volunteer their time to collect and remove illegally dumped trash rather than waiting for the city to do it.
When those District B volunteers were asked why they would give up their free time to engage in such grueling, dirty work, they said they don’t see it as dirty work. Sure, they’re literally dealing with dirt and trash. But for them, what they’re really dealing with is the love they have for their hood and the beauty of their surroundings that they want to restore and maintain.
Almost to a person, they said they feel better when their community is clean. They feel personally insulted when people go out of their way to trash their community. To them, their community, their neighborhood is forreal-forreal an extension of them and how they feel about and see themselves.
Maybe the willingness to trash your own neighborhood speaks to deeper internal issues our people have to deal with – they see themselves as less than, so they willingly treat their community as less than. Maybe if they felt better about themselves, they’d feel better about where they lay their heads.
And some believe one of the ways to change the way you feel on the inside is to engage in actions on the outside that send a different message to your brain. In other words, maybe it’s possible to rewire folk who see themselves as “less than” by having them purposely and regularly cleaning up their neighborhoods – changing the inside feelings by changing outside actions. It’s worked before in other areas.
I don’t know, but we need to do something – to clean up our places of residence while also cleaning up our feelings about ourselves.
