Trashed

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

This has to be the trashiest county on earth.

You can’t drive down the road anymore without seeing bags and bags of trash sitting along the roadside.

This bothers me to no end.

I mean, I can see myself driving down the road to the local refuse-collection station with a bag or two or more of garbage on the back of my pickup, then noticing one or two of them fly off the bed of the truck in the direction of the nearest ditch – and going about my merry friggin’ way.

You know, doo-de-doo-de-doo, nothing happened there, doo-de-doo-de-doo.

This apparently happens every day around where I live.

My 10-mile drive to Waynesboro is like what you’d get from using a hidden camera to film the inside of a giant dumpster.

My walk down my otherwise quiet country lane is about as bad.

My niece Kayla and I took a walk a few weekends ago down the lane – and upon coming across a discarded beer bottle decided to start counting how many bottles and cans we saw on the side of the road.

Keep in mind that we walked for maybe a mile.

We lost count at 155.

What goes through people’s minds when they throw a bottle or can or fast-food bag or cigarette packaging or anything and everything else out the window of their car or truck?

Need to clean up in here. There, that’s better.

People like this deserve no mercy, really, truthfully.

I’m serious. Jail time is too good for the litterers among us.

I’m thinking of something along the lines of The Scarlet Letter here.

Thirty days of having to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with a red-letter L might do something to cut down on this disturbing new trend.

Better yet, let’s mandate it that they’re not allowed to wash it for the entire length of the sentence.

Then the perpetrators might get a sense of what they’ve done to the world at large through their actions.

 

Chris Graham’s Stop the Presses column appears on this blog on Tuesdays and Fridays. For more on Chris Graham’s humor columns and other fiction writing, visit www.authorchrisgraham.com.