Wed, 10 Sep 2008
Garbage Rant
I was reminded of something when reading one of Jen's posts.
She wrote:I was driving behind a man this morning who felt that it was appropriate to throw his empty Starbucks cup out of the window, onto the roadside. Now, my opinion about Starbucks aside (HATE IT. Venti? Come ON...it's LARGE), I live in the Bay Area where being environmentally conscious is almost a religion.The weird thing is that I've always thought the same thing but yet I've always been shocked (although the feeling's faded) about how much people litter out here in CA (SF in particular, but Jen's story was shocking to me because it's the "clean south bay"). My parents and I have this running joke about places being "first world"- I can't remember exactly how the joke got started but I think we started it after my first visit to Switzerland (I was hunting Nazi descendents and tracing Jewish funds that had been "repatriated" to Swiss banks... but that's another story). I think I had said something about how spotless the place was and my dad said, "now that's first world"-- and I said, "no, it's .5-- it's cleaner than first world". We don't just use the joke about garbage though. But when I moved to SF I had this image in my head- "Silicon Valley inventors, no garbage, wired busses that don't make noise, e-poppin/rave-attending coders, Wired magazine readers, sci-fi writers, hippies, restaurants, wine and bad football teams". You know- real "first world". But the thing is, San Francisco is by FAR the dirtiest fucking placed I've ever lived in. And the rolling blackouts wiped out any hope for "first world" status in my eyes. I still like it (most of the time), but good lord people, clean up after yourselves. I dunno, maybe there's no equivalent out here to growing up in Texas where the motto "Don't Mess With Texas" isn't just the most successful anti-littering campaign ever but a creed to live by. Maybe it's because we'd kick each others' asses (or at least report them to the Rangers) if we saw litterers and people out here don't do that. I partly wouldn't blame people if they did throw trash because of some Berkeley tree-sitter saying "omg omg don't litter" all the time.
Of course if a SF cop did this, some PBR-drinkin' fixie rider would start crying In my hood there is a ton of pink plastic bag trash- especially on Clement. The times I've yelled at people to not litter, they suddenly feigned a lack of understanding of English. (I bet I get bad comments about that line). And it's not just my neighborhood (which is cleaner on Lake). There are problems downtown too and all over-- Recently I was wandering over to Angie & Mike's in the Castro and saw this one dude trying to sneak behind the library- he had already dumped out some bags of trash in the yard of the yellow house on the end of the street and was getting ready to take a dump. (yes, pulling his pants down to defecate -dump, yes in theird 'yard') I was about to yell at the guy and the homeowners came out and said "ummm excuuuuuuuuse me, that's our yard sir, you need to get out of there soon." Soon? WTF? How about:"GTFO our property and take your bags of trash with you, and you have 25 seconds to do it."? Johnny D & the Rocket 88s I'm not sure I have a solution to the problem . . . but I think some tough love and billyclubs are in order. How about we arm Jen and let her rove around giving out citations? That'd be a start.
10 Sep 14:39 | /rants_and_raves | 4 comment(s)
angie wrote:
the cops are FINALLY starting to come back through our hood. the crackheads were getting pretty damn bold lately.
09/10/2008 16:42:15
Jen wrote:
Dude, I would seriously RE-GU-LATE that shit. Do I get my weapon of choice?
09/10/2008 18:46:51
marc say's.... wrote:
what....is that bad form? Kylie gets away with it!
09/12/2008 18:03:40
Jim C. wrote:
This is so funny to me. From day one when I set foot in The Shitty as a kid I saw how nasty it was. It reeks of piss. I can't even imagine thinking it would be an different.
This has also convinced me that ALL cities are this way (I imagine NY being the worst).
Maybe not Singapore where they chop your head off for chewing gum.
Overall I feel like Ca. is pretty clean. I am surprised if I see someone litter. It is a rare occurrence in my life.
I think Texas is just as dirty but it's spread out over a larger area :)
Live the SRV.
09/14/2008 03:57:02
Trackback
TrackBack ping me at:
http://www.kenneths.org/flog/rants_and_raves/trash-sf.orlytrackback
