I walk for an hour early in the morning before work everyday in a big, sprawling parking structure. It gives me a chance to counteract all of the snacks I am going to eat that night, provides me with an hour of quiet reading and reflection, and inadvertently, also gives me the chance to witness something very few people who work in a business complex see...an actual person picking up all of the trash that gets left on the concrete floor of the parking structure.
I've been walking in that parking structure every weekday morning for about a year now, and I have seen everything from a rotting banana to a single Cheez-It, to more than a few used Band-Aids, and items that have ranged in size from a paperclip to a stack of empty boxes and packaging material six feet high. One morning, there was even a discarded and obviously used condom. And what amazes me, yet fails to surprise me each time I walk past discarded items like these, is that a member of the human collective - someone who most likely is educated, has enough of a work ethic to hold down a job, and perhaps, like me, began their career in a service job - made the very deliberate and at least somewhat conscious effort to leave that item on the concrete floor of the parking structure and then drive or walk away.
I’m often also amazed at how close some of these items are left to one of the two trashcans that are on every level of the parking structure. While I don’t accept the excuse, I do at least slightly understand the frustration one might have at walking a couple hundred feet to a trashcan, but you’d be surprised at how many of these discarded items are literally within a toss-length of those trashcans.
Seeing these discarded items oft reminds me of that venerable episode of The Simpsons where the haphazard and lovingly ever-clueless embodiment of the stereotypical American, Homer Simpson, runs for Springfield Trash Service Commissioner under the slogan, "Can't someone else do it?" Homer runs on a whim, driven by completely controllable circumstances that spiraled out of control due to his own laziness, driving him to seek revenge by dethroning the sitting Trash Service Commissioner instead of holding himself accountable for his own actions. Homer’s slogan and promise that everyone in the town will no longer be responsible for picking up their own trash thanks to his garbage men naturally get him elected in a landslide victory.
In fact, just about every time I have walked past one of those discarded items on the parking structure floor, I have laughed a bit to myself and asked in my best Homer voice in my head, “Can’t someone else do it?”
I sometimes find myself wondering if the people that leave these items lying there on the floor, whether dropped out of their car while sitting, or dropped before or after getting out of the car, realize that at some point, another person is going to have to come along and pick up their garbage for them. I wonder if they think, perhaps, that the garbage is not picked up by a person at all – that maybe there is one of those magic parking-lot-cleaning vacuum trucks that does all the work. And then, of course, I wonder if perhaps they don’t even think about it at all. It’s just trash, and trash goes on the ground, and they don’t care one bit what happens to it or who it might effect.
Maybe it’s the fact that I spent my formative teenage years working thankless service jobs that ranged from bagging groceries to making cookie dough, to selling children’s clothes, to loading delivery trucks by hand, or the fact that at some point in each of those jobs, I was the one picking up the trash, but I can’t say that I have ever simply tossed trash on the ground and just walked away. I definitely have never thought there wasn’t someone that was going to have to come along and pick up that trash at some point. I’ll spare you the environmentalist lecture on the side effects all that trash has on our environment, but will still lightly touch on the fact that the people that discard these items have to at least realize all the trash lining our roads and highways most likely came from folks like them.
The bottom line is that I have always been aware that whether being picked up by hand or picked up by a vacuum truck or other machine operated by a person, there was in fact, a person out there that would be the one who had to pick up my trash if I just left it lying there on the ground. And I simply cannot figure out why it seems there are so many people out there that do not share this understanding.
I really wish each and every one of the people who toss their garbage on the floor of that parking structure could be there early in the morning when I watch a living, breathing human being have to bend down, take other people’s trash into his own hand and repeat this over and over again. I wish they could see this person who still somehow manages to greet me with a smile each morning being the “someone else” in “Can’t someone else do it?”
