The Trash (Part 1)

And always.. The trash… the garbage.

(Warning: Links are to youtube.)

Everywhere you look, unless you've turned off a public street into carefully contained environments - like the Westin or Sheraton or the large modern hospital campus where we dropped someone off - trash blows in whatever breeze there is and lays in piles against buildings, in the gutters along the roads, against anything that stops it blowing. And no one picks it up.

In front of nice stores, against the high outer walls of the huge villas. In empty lots with slum dandelions, in a group of houses at the edge of a rural village. In the streets around the IT office parks. Folks eat an ice cream or a bag of chips, and drop the container on the ground. Ticket stubs, receipts, plastic bottles -- on the ground. A large grassy field against the blue bay becomes unbearable to photograph because of the garbage all around. Sometimes there are large piles on corners -- clearly gathered by someone and piled up there for who knows what reason.

Visually it reminds me of the Keep America Beautiful crying Indian ad from the 1970s.

It's bad in the cities -- and it's worse in the villages and rural areas.

(This is not just the don't-care attitude of impoverish people everywhere -- I've seen similar piled garbage in Appalachia and in inner city lots in NYC. We could spend days theorizing the reasons why poor people take no pride in their surroundings.)

This, instead, seems systemic. No matter how many plastic trash cans are placed around, people don't seem to use them. It doesn't occur to them. They just drop it on the ground without a thought, and move on.

And why does no one pick it up??