THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 29, 1995 TAG: 9507290001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Short : 49 lines
An ugly mound of cigarette butts in a parking lot carries a message: All litterers make life unpleasant for the rest of us, but some are worse than others.
They aren't often seen in the act - perhaps that's why we hear almost nothing about offenders being caught and penalized under the anti-littering laws - but we come across the obnoxious evidence of their ways almost every day.
One tribe of the truly bad actors leaves its trail along the back roads, for the most part, though major highways shoulders are also a frequent repository. These offenders deliberately transport large bags or batches of refuse to public areas for fast drops, leaving the trash to blight the landscape until government sanitation teams or volunteers get around to cleaning up the mess.
Then there are some others, the despoilers of quiet neighborhoods whose behavior is similarly contemptible. These are the revelers, usually nocturnal, who think it's great stuff to make residential lawns targets of opportunity for the tossing of empty beer cans and the like. If a bottle smashes against a curb or on a sidewalk, leaving really dangerous shards, that seems to be part of the know-nothing, spree-time game, too.
And right along with these we'd have to class their kindred spirits, the ones who use parking lots for their alcoholic discards: whole six-packs of empties along with a scatteration of bottles and perhaps fast-food trash. And the ones, partyers and nonpartyers alike, who either openly or sneakily empty the contents of car ash trays on publicly used pavements - those unsightly heaps I mentioned at the beginning.
These worst of the rural and urban polluters deserve much tougher policing than has yet been devised. But laws can't really cure this flouting of our common-sense rules for clean, pleasant living.
Nor this flaunting of a mystifying, it-isn't-a-big-deal (who-cares?) arrogance.
Somehow, what might be called the ignoramus quotient (evident in a lot of other things, too) needs lowering, and we need to find a way. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB