Lost Messages - A Littering Rant

FAOL Community Fly Anglers Online
1

I remember the commercial, do you?

There was a scene of a Native American, (we used to call them Indians way back then); sadly looking over pollution and a trash strewn landscape as a tear fell slowly down his cheek. The message:

Keep America Beautiful; DON?T LITTER!

As a naive kid back then I got the message loud and clear along with the other message on the side of my pack of Marlboro’s. Stop throwing crap out of the car window and on the ground and while you?re at it; stop smoking, it causes cancer.

By the way, what ever happened to those “litter bags” that people used to hang from their cigarette lighters?

Yesterday while fishing at a local state park; I couldn?t help but sadly notice LOTS of discarded soda cans and candy wrappers left behind along the lake by slobs. While a Pennsylvania State Park may hardly be considered the ?great outdoors? by most; it IS the great outdoors for many. How come this life?s lesson; along with the smoking one has been lost on so many of today?s youth?

I know that possibly some of this discarded garbage was left behind by adults, but they may be my age which means they SAW “the commercial”. If the offenders were adults but not old enough to remember the “crying Indian”; why didn?t THEIR parents tell THEM about the commercial?

While litter is wrong no matter where it happens; it is a particular egregious activity in an area that is SUPPOSED to be enjoyed for its natural beauty. I can only imagine what the trash dumpers backyards look like; but maybe they don?t $#!+ in their own playground, just mine.

While I don?t want to argue cause and effect or the possible sociological and economic reasons for littering and whether it is related to slovenliness, political affiliation or video games; I do want to plead to the parents of this country that the anti littering message of my youth seems to have been lost in amongst all of the other more trendy and ?worldly? messages out there. It just doesn?t seem to be as taboo to litter as it USED to be?

?I mean, somebody will eventually pick it up?right?

Oh yea, and while you are at it; teach your kids that smoking is bad for them too. The sight of $6 a pack cigarette smoke coming from the lungs of 20-somethings blows me away. I guess that warning label was a useless message too?

I never thought 30 years after I saw the Indian crying instead of a Marlboro commercial on TV; that I’d see a cigarette smoking kid throwing a candy wrapper on the ground.

Oh well, I guess I’m still naive.

?end of rant?

2

There is an element of our society, increasing actually, that holds themselves aside from the populace, the normal ones. We are fortunate that they are, for the time being anyway, in the minority or there would be laws supporting their behavior.

Laws, rules, ethics, even morales do not apply or restrain them. Their goals and motives are so important that nothing they can do is in any way ‘wrong’ nor can they be held responsible for any of their actions. To them, “the ends do indeed, justify the means.” Therefore, there is no such thing as right and wrong, truth and lies or good and bad.

They’re emotionally deficient, having failed to escape puberty and the denials of the period. They can not be held for blame as they have no comprehension of responsibility. There can be no changing of their attitudes, they are flawless and above reproach. Much of it relates to respect, their lack of it actually. Their respect for themselves and everything else are not open to question.

Their mother is still out there, picking up after them. At least they think she is. And they feel they darn well deserve it.

Toilet-training was never quite finished, bed-wetting was notable, but at least they no longer hold their breath, turn blue and fill their drawers when challenged. We still call them litter-bugs.

3

All I can add to JC’s post is “AMEN”.

Bill

4

Last week, a friend and I took a group of 6th graders from one of the local middle schools where he is teaching a fly fishing class in summer school to Roaring River SP to fish. My buddy had arranged for a reserved pool and 200 high-quality trout just for these 9 kids. When I say high quality I mean that the state of MO stocks 12" trout, but there wasn’t one of these under 15" and some were well over 20". There was nowhere in that pool that a kid could cast to a spot with no fish. They caught a standard size ice chest full in 2 hours. Not bad at all for their first time fly fishing…some of them first time fishing, period.

Then we broke for lunch. The school had packed them all a nice brown bag lunch and my friend’s daughter had brought Twinkies and all sorts of individual size bags of chips. We brought our own lunches and ate at a different picnic table from the kids. When it was time to go, my friend said, “It’s time to go and you need to make sure and pick up all of this trash.” But before he got to “…and you need to make sure…,” the kids were running to the bus and screaming “it’s not my trash…I didn’t drop any trash.” One kid stayed behind and helped my friend and I pick it all up. The trash cans were on the way to the bus. I swear there was not a single piece of paper or plastic from those lunches that was not on the ground around their table.

We cornered these heathens and told them they had just lost their ice cream stop on the way home. We explained why. I gave them my 2-minute speech “If everyone would pick up and dispose of one more piece of trash than they brought with them…” We got more protests early on, and that’s why I gave the speech. It seemed to make sense to them. So we went fishing in a different part of the park.

We only had another half hour to fish before having to head back to the school. When we got back to the bus, we saw 2 of the boys who had wandered furthest away from us to fish carrying armloads of trash to the dumpster near the bus. They had spent their time picking up other people’s trash in the adjacent campground instead of fishing. When everyone was on the bus, we pointed out what these two boys had done and told the group that these two had just earned them back their ice cream stop. But those two would get ice cream and the rest only a soda.

My buddy and I discussed this on the bus ride back. He’s a retired school teacher who only retired last year. We concluded that these kids simply didn’t know any better. You can SAY anything. You can put it on TV even. But without POSITIVE ROLE MODELS out there DEMONSTRATING it and making these kids feel consequences and rewards for bad and good behavior, they don’t LEARN anything. You can’t tell a kid to tie their shoes, demonstrate it once, and then ignore them. You have to actually TRAIN them to tie their shoes through repetition and reinforcement until it becomes second nature to them. Actually, this is true of EVERYTHING you want kids to learn. Educators have forgotten this. Parents have never learned it. And society no longer gives a rip. So don’t blame the kiddos.

5

I remember that commercial. If I remember right his name was
" Iron Eyes Cody" .

It became hard to teach kids right from wrong when they started throwing parents in jail for spanking their kids when they done wrong. When I was a kid if dad caught us throwing trash on the ground we got a good swat and then he gave us a bag and we had to pick up what we threw out as garbage plus we had to fill the bag with other trash laying around. We couldn’t do anything else till that bag was filled.

Rocky

6

I remember that commercial as well. My parents would not tolerate us kids littering and would give us a lecture followed by a trash bag and sent out into the neighborhood to clean it up.

7

In British Columbia all beverage containers, cans , bottles, etc have a deposit on them and can be returned for cash. As a direct result of this you no longer see miles and miles of broken glass beside the highways. No longer do campsites have a multitude of cans and bottles littering about. The parks and playgrounds remain relatively clean. Even the cans that a few idiots do throw away are quickly scooped up by enterprising youngsters to add to their collections and turned in for cash.

Sadly the rest of the litter is still with us. As JC said, caused by the few non caring minority.

Very good post JC.

8

I too remember that comercial. I like to think that I also got the message! From my good friend rainbowchaser I learned to carry an empty onion bag with me to hold the trash I found.
Well, they don’t make onion bags big enough to haul out all the trash you find along the rivers and in the puplic access areas here in TN! It’s not just the adults, I see them “Training” the kids to litter too!! What a wonderful sight to see a whole family fishing the banks of the Duck or the Elk, of course when they leave bring in the front end loader to clean up the litter.
No bottle deposit here and it shows! As a new resident I am embarrassed and angered by the total disregard for “picking up behind you”.
I guess they figure that when the TVA generates or discharges excess water it just gets flushed away!
This disregard for littering is not restricted to recreation area. I’m always picking trash out of my front yard!
One thing that States with bottle/can deposits should address is plastic water bottles. That is one of the items found most in Michigan.

9

A Bump, An Amen and a hellz yeah!!!

And as Jack points out…It sure does show in the difference of NY having the bottle deposit…and PA NOT having it…Sure wish the powers that be here in PA would wake up and see the good it would do us ALL to have it…

10

Bamboozle J.C. and Silvermallard,give em both barrels.
I know way to many kids that feel entitled to do just as they please because they know that their parents will
excuse them no matter how foul their behavior.
My son and I just returned from an evening at a local river,while we were fishing some local yokels came waddling by with the obligatory big black rubber inner tube and landed in the hole right above us.
After 5 minutes of listening to them shouting really foul obscenities at each other I suggested they refrain from the profanity and they basically suggested I move along or get my arse kicked by their father.
{bring it on fat boy,if your old man can put down the beer can that long}
the sad part the oldest one was maybe 14 years old,the youngest 6 or 7.
At that age if I had talked to a grown up like that there would have been an arse kicking for sure.Mine!!
It would have been a week before I would have thought about sitting down.
The beat part though was my son when we left he looked at me and said dad you would kick my butt if I ever talked like that wouldn’t you and I just looked at him,smiled and said YEP!! He laughed and we headed down the river.

11

You guys have already said it all. It depresses me to fish several of my favorite lakes in Wilderness areas only to see bottles, cans, bait containers, 100’ sections of monofilament line, and once even a whole Billings Gazette newspaper once (that got sacrificed to a campfire). I know of one can in a lake that I would pick up if it weren’t sitting in 10’ of water. Drives me nuts sitting there fishing and looking down at it. Actually two weekends ago I sat down under a tree at a lake that will remain nameless (for several reasons :frowning: ) and when I got up I found a size 2 bait hook attached to my pants…actually thought something was wrong when my pants wanted to go one way and me the other. I picked the hook up, as well as all the line attached to it and packed it out. Hmmm maybe I should remove the hook from my fly box before someone gets the wrong idea LOL.

gon: offtopic by a bit…but have you hiked into a USFS Wilderness lake and seen somebody decide to run a remote control boat all over the lake :frowning: ? happened to me two weeks ago in the Beartooths…good thing I was on the other side of the lake or I would have given them both barrels myself.

bambooozle…as far someone actually picking it it up…I wouldn’t count on it. I have seen cans that are very rusted and have been laying around for a while :(. I pack out a lot of excess garbage or lost items each year. My parents packed out a GPS unit a couple of years that someone had lost (and very very doubtful that they were going to go back for it based on location). I used it until last year when it finally decided to not work quite right…still sitting on my coffee table since I have some waypoints to transfer to my new one hehehe

12

I was a very unhappy person 5 yrs ago. Doctor’s orders, I started Volunteering. I doubted that I could ever help someone, especially since I couldn’t help myself. Now, I have learned something very important and that is, I spent my whole life ‘Reacting Negatively’ to everything that went wrong in my life. Thinking of Life like a basketball game, I was only defensive and didn’t know how to play offense. Volunteering has taught me that I can make a difference in people’s lives and those same people have changed my life. So I salute the people that Volunteer to help our kids be better citizens. I remember those Leaders when I was a kid and how important that Leadership was to me. The question is; Do we give up on kids or do we go on the offense and at least help one kid?
Doug

13

I think that many of you are being a bit misguided by a number of bad experiences which I agree warrant some conversation. I want to add, however, that these bad eggs are not as rampant as were making them out to be. This particular generation of kids (dubbed the Millennial Generation) has been studied extensively. They are team players, they identify with their parents values and accept authority, and they are smart, driven and goal oriented (Much more so than previous generations). They are also the most ?watched over? generation in History; and this is important for two reasons. Some over-parent, and far too many under-parent. This generation actually needs the structure placed over them, where previous generations were often expected to structure themselves.

I also want to add, that half the reason kids are the way they are today are because of adults like you and I. It?s not a kid that uses sex to sell clothing. It?s not a kid that puts crap on tv, portrays it as ?cool?, and then tweaks it until it reaches the largest population of youngsters. We sell that to them, not because its what they want, but because these initiatives are residues of trends launched by the generations that preceded them.

The problems were identifying are no different today than they were twenty years ago. What is different, is that we have people our age practically defining this negative directions and it has in many ways become an expectation for the youths of today. That commercial was made in the 70?s because littering was rampant. Yeah, maybe none of us do it frequently, but this only helps to prove my point: It was happening then, its happening now, nothings really changed. So to answer the question, many of us have given up on kids before we had given them a chance in the first place, so to continue to do so will only extrapolate the problems were already discussing.

I?m also assuming that when were having a rant session on littering, that those on here complaining actually did pick up the trash that we?re complaining about. Yeah that first guy may have though ?someone else will pick it up?, but how many other people are going to do that before its gone. This is one of those things I am constantly reminding myself of. Yeah it drive me nuts to see beer cans on the side of the stream, but how many times are you going over that tirade in your head and not picking up the can. I found that I did that too often, and its something I?m certainly trying to change. I love the onion bag idea!

Anyway, sorry for the rant, but I pretty much am in the profession of hearing people complain about kids. I should also add that each year 400 of my Greek students band together and pick up trash all around the community. This is on top of the numerous philanthropy events and community service efforts that their organizations plan and implement individually. Were they the same kids that may be acting like idiots in a tube, perhaps, but they do have some good in them also. We just need to help them find it.

14

Silver…a most EXCELLENT post. Thanks for your caring.

Bamboozle…thank you for posting. It’s so important to take the time for parenting …completely.

I have also recently witnessed some adults driving in front of me, spitting out the window, then flicking the cig. butt out…followed by a McDonalds bag. Unbelievable! I REALLY wanted to say something but it would’ve been trouble. I’m not too eloquent when I’m peed…and I’m a little guy!

Thanks for the post. I (we) took a lot of time with our two sons who’ve been complimented in the past at restaurants for manners. I just am happy they carried the lessons with them. And soap is cheap. Please and thank you’s are free!

I’ll never understand being a pig. It ruins things for everyone, including yourself.

Jeremy.

15

Get used to all the litter and get ready for more. With the continued uncontrolled flow of illegal aliens into the States it will only get worse. I have traveled to many 3rd World countries and one thing that often stands out is the amazing amout of trash everywhere. Not saying that all of them litter but it’s the way things are where they come from so it makes sense that they would continue doing the same once they get here.

That being said I see plenty of white collar (and blue collar) American’s tossing their butts or the McDonalds bag out the window so I’m not trying to pin it all on the illegals.

I own some hunting property with about 400’ of road frontage in a rural area and every weekend we visit we fill a garbage bag with all the trash the locals toss out the window. Very sad!

16

Jeremy,
I commend you for raising your kids to have manners. My Parents raised six kids and I being the oldest had a good view of how we all acted. Our family went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant once a month and more than once a employee commented on our good manners. I APPRECIATED going out to eat and going to A&W to have ROOTBEER FLOATS brought to our car window (frosted glasses!). :smiley:
My Dad barbQed hamburgers once or twice each summer and I got ONE hamburger.
I thank God I was not a spoiled child because it serves me well today and I love my Parents for it.

Jeff,
On the subject of illegal Aliens, I have been sheltered most of my life from people from other countries. I grew up with friends that were like me that had ancestors from out of the U.S., but I have never been out of the U.S. I moved to my residence a year ago and I have met people from Mexico. I don’t know what their Status is, but I am reporting that these people bust their butts working and have the most well behaved kids since Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best!
That immigration issue is politics and nothing more. Illegal people wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the greed of OUR companies wanting to cut costs. Like I said before, WE need to worry about OUR conduct and not our neighbors.
Like GBF once said, “I Have Spoken!”

17

Wow. That just smacks of prejudice. It’s unfounded and offensive. I’d even rate it right at the top with littering.

18

Doug,

First off companies are not greedy, people are. Second, a company sole purpose is to make a profit. Cutting cost is but one way of ensuring sustained profitability. As for why illegal people come to the US, many come to escape proverty and the chance at a better life.

19

I remember that commercial too!
I think JC nailed it. These people seem to think that they are somehow independant of nature and therefore can use it for whatever they want. It doesn’t suprise me that we have global warming, with that type of mentality running amok.
I was out fishing last Saturday and a couple in a canoe flipped over, by the far bank. All their beer emties fell into the river. Neither of them even made an attempt to pick them up. God, I hate that.

20

Tyrone,
Your right! People are greedy. They have the board meetings and decide to fire regular workers and ‘contract’ out the work to unscrupulous people who hire illegals and then the president of the company says he doesn’t know anything about illegal workers in his company. All tied up with a bow!
Cases; Portland School District fired their Janitors and Fred Meyer Inc. fired their Warehouse Janitors.
I don’t care who gets mad at me, I never had much use for executives (bosses) who have nothing better to do than have meetings and justify their existence by cutting costs.
Yes I was just a factory worker for 27 yrs and I am proud to say we won plant of the year many times and the Boss was actually at home asleep during my shift!
I didn’t get a Medal but my thanks was I wasn’t harassed.
Rant at a end.
Doug