Why isn’t litter problem a local election issue?
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Ten days ago, a group of hearty volunteers ventured into a cold rain to do their civic duty. They stuffed plastic garbage bags with trash that had been strewn along Route 519 from Hickory to Houston and hauled tires up from stream beds in an annual commemoration of Earth Day.
As admirable as this effort was, the amount of litter they collected is a miniscule fraction of what remains strewn across Washington and Greene counties. Washington Rotarians last weekend conducted their semiannual cleanup of the Jessop Place interchange of Interstate 70 and filled 23 bags with trash just from this tiny spec of our landscape.
As citizens, we should be ashamed and embarrassed at the condition of our roadways. Instead, too many of us have accepted our despoiled environment as inevitable. Rather than being outraged, we are complacent.
Without doubt, some of the parents of children in our schools are the morons who think nothing of hurling their fast-food detritus and beer cans from their car windows. Who raised these people? What example do they set for their children? If their parents won’t, shouldn’t our schools be teaching kids about the damage littering does to society and the environment so that we are not raising another generation of slobs?
Removing litter is something that we need to be doing every day, not just on Earth Day.
In the May primary, we will nominate candidates for local offices. There is often little competition for these positions, and seldom are there issues to debate. We should insist that candidates for township supervisor or borough or city council address the litter problem. The job the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is doing to keep state roadways clean is miserable, and the indifference of local government to the condition of the roadsides in their jurisdictions is appalling. Our local elected officials have a duty to mobilize their citizens to keep their neighborhoods clean. We have an opportunity to choose the people who can do that in May, and in the general election in November.