You’re Littering
It’s recently come to my attention that I litter. A lot. I’m the type of person to hold on to an empty can of Dr. Pepper or a peach pit (not that one) or the cellophane around my new pack of cigarettes, until I can reach a garbage receptacle to throw them away. I’m not alone. I don’t know anyone that consciously throws their trash on the ground. While this does occur with alarming frequency around NYC, most people are in the same boat as me: we’re indisposed to disposing things on the ground. But this is a fallacy, as every cigarette smoker I know, myself included, litters their cigarette butts between 50-99% of the time.
This is partially because we don’t think to stub them out and throw them away. It doesn’t even register for us. Mainly it’s because we’ve been preconditioned to simply throw them in the street/train track/pool of water/sewer gate/anything that’s not flammable. This is as much a factor of time and convenience as it is a blatant disregard for the social etiquette of today’s pedestrians. America isn’t a 3rd world country; we put our trash in a bin for trash and try and keep our streets clean (both metaphorically—hey NYPD!—and figuratively—). I’m not averse to picking up after myself, but cigarettes simply don’t register.
Back to the why of the question where I postulated time and convenience as the primary causes for littering cigarette butts. Often people are smoking outside. You can’t smoke in bars anymore, and most people prefer to keep their living quarters free of the clinging aroma of a filtered Camel Light Blue. As such, the predominant environment for smoking is outside—just not in a NYC park/beach/sidewalk in Times Square. Smokers have been relegated to the sidewalk corners, rooftops, dirty patios and fire escapes of America to inhale their addictions. This is fine, but it also amplifies the frequency of our littering. Stuck with a cigarette burned down to the nub of the filter, smokers often toss them in the above locales. This is still littering.
The time factor is also interspersed with the convenience problem. We’re hurrying to catch a train, or climb aboard a bus, and flicking the cigarette is a natural inclination when we’re ducking into wherever we’re going. Ashtrays are decorative bric-a-brac rather than pragmatic waste containers. Sometimes a bar will have those tall stands outside their establishment without any clear identifying marks labeling it as an ashtray. So, again, the butt hits the curbs.
You’d think this would be the primary complaint amongst non-smokers, but littering is much further down the the list of offenses. The non-smoking proselytizers whose chorus of cancer and second-hand smoke is mum on the littering, and yet those cigarette butts account for a pretty decent sized landscape for filth. Instead of foisting their passive-aggressive pedagoguery in our direction, the anti-smoking campaign should be guilting us into picking up after ourselves. As gross as our breath and teeth are becoming, the planet is doing a lot worse.
Stop trying to save us, and save your goddamn streets first. Let us die our deaths. We deserve it. The planet didn’t do anything to deserve all our refuse. I’ll try better, but you should curse me out when I forget. I can handle that. Now where are my smokes?
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