Any of you remember that slogan from oh, I guess the lat 50's or early 60's?
DON'T BE A LITTER BUG!
Evidently the problem of motorists discarding trash along the highways as they toodled along finally got to the point where nearly everyone was fed up with it. So it became a NATIONAL problem with a national program to try to make people aware of it. And it did seem to work! The trash previously noted along the roadways pretty much dried up and stopped being the national eyesore it had become.
Well I don't know what it is like in your part of Florida, but here just below the Tallahassee area, the littering problem is becoming astronomical. Connie and I drove up to Tallahassee this morning along route 319, and the amount of trash along the roads is appalling. It looked like we were driving through a dumpsite. I don't believe I can say it has always been that way here, that the locals just don't get the picture, and have NEVER gotten the picture, but it certainly has been getting noticeably worse. And I do say "locals" because I really don't think the problem is from visitors just passing on through.
We live on a dirt road, which is just a loop road off of 319. No reason for anyone but locals to use it at all, and we have a horrendous problem with trash being discarded from vehicles using that road. We have a stream that is crossed over by two bridges on the north end of our property, and it seems to be some sort of irresistible compulsion for people to throw their trash into the streams. Every year we will find deer carcasses floating in the streams during hunting season. Washing machines and tires just dropped over the side into the water. Right now there is an upside down cooler floating in the bigger of the two streams.
What the heck is WRONG with people who would soil their own nest like this? What is so tough about carrying a garbage bag in your vehicle rather than just opening the window and tossing out that MacDonald's bag wherever you happen to be at the moment? Do they do that sort of thing in their own driveway into their own lawn? Do their neighbors do it to them, so it is OK for them to do it as well? "My dad done it that way, my granddad done it that way, and by gum, I'm gonna do it that way too!" Don't they see the mess along the roads while they are driving that they and others just like them are causing?
Oh, and here's a kicker! It seems that the age old method of discarding your trash in bulk around here is to throw it all into your pickup truck (the bags untied, of course), put the tailgate DOWN, and then drive around as fast as you can until the trash has all blown out the back. When the trash is gone, your job is done.......... Head on back for home, boy!
So is this a problem just HERE, or do you all have that going on around you as well?