More Opportunity for Junk »
Drive down nearly any road in the country and you'll see cigarette butts lining the gutters. But is this because there are more people who don't care and are dumping their butts out the window instead of in the ash tray? Perhaps. But perhaps it's also because there are so many people in so many cars in so much traffic with so many options for acquiring trash, that it's bound to have side effects.
The growth of the fast food industry has created a huge number of options for having more trash than we can handle. While our ancestors trudged through snow uphilll to school (in both directions), we have convenience on every corner. This introduces an amazing amount of trash into our lives. This is trash that simply wasn't there for previous generations. Sure, you might find a burger joint now and again, but there weren't 30,000 McDonald's, where each surely generates tons of disposables every day.
I won't say this absolves us of all responsibility - not by a long shot. It just means we need to work harder. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had joined the ranks of the unemployed. During those weeks, we've done a lot of eating in - and it's amazing when we consider the money we spend and the crap that builds up from that fairly simple occurence in most people's lives. If nothing else, we've learned that.
