Like I show up at a playground at say 8 am, maybe the trash left there was from 8 hours ago ... now someone gets upset that the city didn't do a thing that is probably a rebellious expectation (can't patrol all the parks overnight every 8 hours) and they shove their hands in their pockets and pout.
I'd rather folks just pick some stuff up and toss it in the bin nearby and we're all good.
A lot of the litter by me either falls out of the bin/truck during collection, is dug out of trash cans by squirrels, or spills out when the wind opens the can lid or even blows it over completely. There's things we can do to mitigate that but it'll never be perfect so you'll always see "someone else's trash" blowing in the wind.
If you can stop for a moment to take a picture, you could pick a piece of it up too... but there's also the "ah I don't have time to do it all so I won't do anything"
Ideally what would happen is that people would be self-conscious enough to figure out after one or two slip ups that someone else is having to clean up for them, and feel bad enough to avoid doing it in the future.
This has become one of my bigger hard learned lessons. I used to go out of my way to be as considerate as possible to everyone I interacted with, trying to predict issues and mentioning them early to make things easier for others even if it might inconvenience myself. The idea was that people would reciprocate enough that it'd make things easier for myself too.
But over the years I've had to stop accepting that, because as it turns out, most people really don't care. Being extremely accommodating and planning ahead to fit someone's constraints won't mean that I get the courtesy returned. They'll just continue to push me around at their own convenience.
I've lived long enough to know that this won't happen in my lifetime, it requires an entirely different societal mindset... something closer to shame/collectivism a country like Japan has (they still have litterers of course, but a much smaller number)
Chronic litterbugs don't care, they're often low enough on the hierarchy of needs that this kind of morality isn't on their radar at all.
If everyone pitched in, you might pick up a single piece of trash occasionally... so you'd avoid the "I just cleaned up this whole park yesterday" problem, because in theory you'd have a larger number or people doing a little work rather than a smaller number doing most of it.
I regularly pick up trash in my neighborhood, so I get it though... it's impossible for one person to keep up with.
Don’t forget the deliberate litterbugs. There are plenty of people out there with a “for every bottle you pick up, I’ll litter three” attitude. Belligerence against anything seen as a public good is on the rise. I know someone who believes having a clean, trash-free neighborhood is a “liberal” thing. Blows my mind.
I used to think trash around my neighborhood was from just a general mass of people not caring about littering. It sounds like that's what you think too.
Then, one day, I saw a homeless guy dumping every single trash can on the street out completely, tearing open the bags, looking for maybe 2 seconds, and then moving on to the next trash can.
Call me harsh, but that behavior should merit a serious prison sentence. I think people overestimate the damage something like this causes to the environment, but underestimate the damage it does to society and the way people think about each other.
For example, in India, there's a pretty jarring contrast in big cities, between pristine modern buildings with immaculate interiors situated on a street literred with garbage. While Indian society loves to label littering as shameful, because no one sees the street as something they also partly own, their idea of cleaning only extends to keeping their own building immaculate.
Maybe some, but certainly not all!
> The idea was that people would reciprocate enough that it'd make things easier for myself too.
Here is the flaw in your plan; it was a flaw in my plan too. In more naive days, I thought that too. Then at some point we realize what you did: people don't do good things, and you aren't going to change most of them.
That's when we can take a big step forward, and learn what true altruism, generosity, and most of all, what love is: It's caring for and doing good for people who don't 'deserve' it; who act like jerks and idiots, who even do bad things. Anyone who has done good in their life learns this lesson. That is love, the only love in any meaningful sense.
That truth is well known, but not always widely discussed. Look at the Gospels in Christianity, and everything that says we are all sinners. Look at stories of prophets in every culture: ignored, attacked, lynched. More contemporaneously, do you think people who do great good, like Washington or Gandhi or MLK, did not realize what you did about human nature? All those people, those religions, those philosophers - they all know. When Jefferson wrote 'All men are created equal, and are endowed with inalienable rights', he knew who he was writing about. When the framers of the Constitution wrote about forming 'a more perfect union', they knew that would be done would be 'of the people, by the people, and for the people' (as Lincoln said later) - and they knew about people.
And it's about you too. You're a sinner, and an asshole, and ignorant too, just like me. If that's not love, if love excludes those people, who loves you and me? Remember that ancient prayer: 'Forgive us our trespasses ...'.
Last year I was forced to drag my belongings between 3 apartments, each time with zero forewarning, in the summer heat, to rooms with no AC (despite my initial room having been AC, and my still having to pay the higher rent for it), while I had to prepare for my first ever research conference and later was recovering from the worst flu I've ever had, they even dragged me to a roommate conduct meeting which had nothing to do with me, right in the middle of moving. The person the meeting was actually about didn't even attend.
Each time, I had to go to the dorm office and talk to the head administrator in person to get any useful information on what was going on, and was only offered to be compensated after the third time when I came in to the administrator's office, looking half dead from the flu.
I refuse to 'love' people who would put complete strangers through all that suffering without seeming to put in even the smallest effort to empathize and try to make things easier (eg by explaining the things in the email, which they told me in person). I'm not a prophet or saint, nor do I aspire to be one. The only people entitled to my completely unconditional love, generosity, tolerance etc are my immediate family, and friends to a slightly lesser extent. With most other people I'm happy to be polite and help them in small ways by default, but going out of my way to be helpful stops as soon as it becomes obvious that they don't even think about reciprocating in even the smallest of ways. It simply isn't worth the stress I put myself through, and besides not being fair to me, it isn't fair to everyone who does try to reciprocate.
I've had many other similar experiences of my kindness being shamelessly exploited by people who haven't earned it, to the point that they became a bonding moment with my father as he too has had lots of experience with that and had come to a similar approach to treating human interaction. He often got accused of being insincere because of how much effort he put into keeping things smooth for people who reciprocated compared to those who didn't.
