If you've ever been to Las Vegas, I'm sure you'll agree that place is the litterbox of the US. It's probably the filthiest city I've ever been to. Even driving into Nevada, as soon as you cross over the border from UT into NV, the pavement turns to crap and you begin seeing garbage scattered about the sides of the road and tangled in the weeds in the median. How is it that people still think it's ok to toss waste out the windows of their vehicles?
The other day I was heading up I-80 to Park City. I checked my rear view mirror and noticed a kind fellow riding my ass, in his Audi Allroad. My standard reaction in this instance is to begin coasting, generally slowing down once I take my foot off the gas pedal. Usually, this frustrates the tailgater, prompting them to swerve into another lane, slam on the gas pedal (decreasing their MPGs, ooooh checkmate suckerz...) and leave me in their dust.
Now, even though I shouldn't, I give them the obligatory stare as they pass me and I'll typically just smile or wave, hoping to see them pulled over at some point on the side of the road. However, in this particular instance, while the driver was laying on the horn his ugly girlfriend decided to toss her beverage from McDoo out the window as they passed me - spraying backwash and ammo-dumping ice cubes onto the pavement at breakneck speed. Please also note that I was going 75mph in a 65mph zone; so these goodies were probably going 80mph or faster when they passed me displaying their utmost class. No, I didn't write down their plate number. No, I didn't tail gate them back. But I made sure to pick up the next piece of trash I saw later on that day and toss it out. I'm such a boyscout.
The point of this blurb is to say thanks to my Mom for instilling in me the fact that littering gets us nowhere. I remember riding home after Mom took me through the drive-thru at, ironically, McDoo's, when I was a wee sprout (probably four or five years old). I had finished my drink and went to toss the cup out the car window. Mom caught me in the middle of this terrible act I was about to commit just before I was able to release my excited hands - dropping the cup on the ground as we drove down the road. She told me I better not drop that cup or I'd be in for it when I got home. Instead, Mom let me know that I could instead throw the cup into the street from our driveway. A great compromise.
I sat patiently for the rest of the car-ride home. I was prepping myself, getting ready to throw this cup as far as I possibly could from the edge of the driveway. As soon as we pulled into the driveway and the car was stopped, I jumped out of the car, sprinted to the end of the driveway (probably 10 feet), spiked the cup on the ground like my child-hood hero, John Elway, and stomped it flat like a pancake. I proceeded to peel the cup off the pavement, grinning at my destruction, and hail-married that thing into the center of the neighborhood road.
The crushed cup sat in the middle of the road while I stared at it from the end of my parent's driveway. It wasn't transforming into something magical, it wasn't changing colors, it wasn't getting up and walking away on it's own. It just sat there. I became severely bummed. In the experience I had gained in my four or five years of life, I thought littering was the cool thing to do. Mom was smart - inadvertently teaching me a lesson without me knowing. Shortly after realizing the cut wasn't going to do any good in the street, I went a picked it up and tossed it in the garbage.
That's me; the litterbug.Thanks, Mom.
