If you were walking in your community and saw a crushed soda can on the sidewalk, would you pick it up?
Let’s say there was a trash can 10 yards beyond the crushed can, so your commitment to this project would be minimal – would you then?
If you were walking in your community and saw a crushed soda can on the sidewalk, would you curse the person who carelessly threw it down? Would your mind jump to some imaginary police composite sketch of the “perp” and would that sketch look a hell of a lot like American civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick?
I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes modern Republicans tick lately and I think Republicans would take encountering that litter as yet another chance to get angry. The racism and hatred is on a hair-trigger. It’s like confirmation bias is the oxygen they breath.
Whereas normal Americans would take encountering that litter as another chance to silently and anonymously do something nice for their community. Maybe that’s pollyannaish thinking. Who knows?
Also, I’m not angry at anyone who decides to not pick up the can.
in the interest of full disclosure, I don’t give money to pan handlers who stand where traffic can backup at stoplight.
I think anyone who is moved to do that is probably having legit rough time. But I have my reasons, and like everyone, my moral decision making mechanics are a rube-goldberg-contraption of qualified justifications, provisos, rationalizations and exceptions that only make sense to me.
I’d pick it up, and for that matter any other litter I see. I remain an old hippie environmentalist since back in the early seventies. To paraphrase the barrage of Jeebus commercials “The environmentalists got me, and I “get” them.
I do pick up litter in that situation. Mostly I bemoan the lack of accountability to the manufacturer and vendor of the litter. It’s not about how much litter we pick up; it’s about how much is never made and sold in the first place.
Cans are increasingly rare, now we have endless plastic bottles and mylar bags. That’s the crap that’s ending up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Litter is related to poverty – low-income people buy small quantities wrapped in excess packaging (see sachet culture).
I have a fondness for diet Coke, Dr. Pepper, and seltzer in cans. Cans are just the right portion to drink before it gets flat. The 16/20oz plastic bottles are too much soda and too expensive. The second half of the 2L bottles is always flat. The cans used to go on sale at a reasonable price. But I stopped buying soda after the Covid price-gouging set in. Now I drink tap water and homemade iced tea.