Return to my Complaint Department
Go to my home page
© Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
Many years ago, as I would go walking, I would see, at the side of the road, lots of candy wrappers, some gum wrappers, lots of plastic bags and paper bags, an occasional bread wrapper, all sorts of nuts and bolts and nails (which were on their way to sticking into my tires), soft drink cans, beer cans and bottles, assorted other bottles, sometimes a shoe (I never witnessed a shoe being lost), cigarette packages, and cigarette butts. Nowadays, I see some of all of that (even a shoe). But, mainly I see cigarette butts. A tremendously greater percentage of the litter that I see is now cigarette butts. Are there more smokers now? No, there are less.
What it amounts to is that cigarette smokers are the main group of people who still litter. Why would they do that, when the rest of us are now fairly conscious of the evils of littering. My neighborhood offers a clue. It is strongly biased toward college students, i.e. party animals. Every weekend, particularly football weekends, there are beer cans and bottles all over the streets, lawns, and sidewalks. College parties mean lots of things (fun, sex, drugs, booze, risk of life and limb...). But in relation to this essay, college parties mean contempt for your neighbors. Some even drive across a complete stranger's lawn, spinning their tires, in the middle of the night. So, I deduce a relationship between littering (and other forms of vandalism), and contempt for neighbors.
The smokers (many of them, maybe most of them) are showing contempt for the rest of us, by littering. They do it blatantly, they do it intentionally. They drop cigarette butts on the sidewalk (sometimes stepping on it, to show that they have some small amount of humanity). They throw cigarette butts out of the car window (a little fireworks display for our entertainment). We've been picking on them, for trying to kill us with smoke. And littering is their little way of saying "up yours" in response.
I recently drove to Las Vegas. There's still plenty of litter beside the freeways. The most visible litter is plastic bags, plastic bottles, and broken glass. But, when I walk on a relatively unlittered road, in Montana, I see mostly cigarette butts. I think that Montana should adopt Nevada, and clean up the litter.