Litter August 27, 2016

[Martin Hash]

Most Americans were born after it became socially unacceptable to litter so they don't know that when we were kids, we threw our Popsickle wrappers out of the window of the car and watched them sail away. The sides of the roads were awash with litter but it must have been invisible because no one said much about it, let alone did anything. Then along came the “litterbug” campaign, fines for littering, grade school indoctrination, and all the rest, and miraculously litter disappeared. Today, in America, people pick up litter voluntarily rather than leave it to blight everyone else's view. I never knew how remarkable that was until I started traveling in countries where litter is a fact of life, omnipresent & inescapable.

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In Iran, for example, a theocracy so rigid that the force women to wear heavy clothing & cover their heads even in the heat, and pray five times per day in “Pray Houses” built along with gas stations, the absolutely beautiful countryside is almost totally obscured by litter, of every possible kind. Even babbling brooks up in the mountains are minefields of plastic bottles & other rubbish. The waves of the Caspian Sea are capped with trash, and the beaches are inaccessible in filth. Considering the manpower available to clean up manmade tsunami of refuse, makes the situation even more of a travesty. You'd think Allah would tell the Ayatollah, “hey, get your folks to pick up after themselves.”

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