[RP TownTalk] Street sweeping

[Dwight Holmes]

Exactly, Jeffrey. I was just going to reply to Bruce's email - before
I saw yours - that the good news to take from this is that - and maybe
I'm older than Bruce - it wasn't always as Bruce remembered it when he
was young.  (OK, he said 'younger', but I take liberties ;-) )  Before
the national campaigns against littering (led by Ms LBJ) littering was
largely unchallenged, unnoted, and ubiquitous.  A combination of a
national education campaign (that continued for *years*) and new laws
-- and presumably some enforcement of those laws -- worked to vastly
reduce the amount of stuff being tossed out, for example, of car
windows along our roads and highways.

A generation later the lesson was not littering, but recycling. I
still chuckle at the story of a colleague of mine when I was at
Florida State in Tallahassee.  He had discovered a garbage bag chock
full of empty beer cans under his teenage son's bed.  It turned out
the son and his friends had been partying one night and accumulated
these empties.  He chose to bring them home, where he hoped to sneak
them into the household recyling bin on collection day, sight unseen
by his parents, rather than the safer but for him unethical option of
just dumping them by the roadside or in a dumpster somewhere.

Part of our problem is, of course, that we are on such a nasty wicket
globally, trying to deal with all the important issues makes one feel
like a teenager with 23 IM windows open simultaneously.

All of that being said, Bruce is right, of course, a little strategic
enforcement locally could go a long way towards achieving the
education that seems, once again, to be required.

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 11:51 PM, Jeffrey Yorke <yorkedial at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Credit Lady Bird Johnson's campaign to "Keep America Beautiful" to reminding the public not to trash their environment....