I Said Something

Ugh.  So I confronted someone who littered, and I quickly learned why I never do it.

Last weekend my mother, daughter and I were coming out of a CostCo.  The sidewalk was a traffic jam of empty carts (not to get off topic, but come on everybody!  If you can haul a 48-pack of Sunchips into your house, you can push a cart ten feet to the cart corral).  So as my mom pushed Phoebe and the groceries around to the car I walked down the sidewalk, where ahead of me, a woman was putting her two daughters in a cart.  She then grabbed a bunch of plastic spoons, napkins and paper cups from those infamous CostCo free samples and threw them on to the ground.  I couldn’t believe it!  She just …threw them!  On the ground!  I was so furious.  And so, inspired by my last blog post, I said something.  I walked up to the cart, began picking up all of her litter, and said something to the effect of, “It looks like someone threw this trash all over the ground, so I’m just going to pick it up, because I hate litter.”  She was obviously caught WAY off guard.  She fumbled for a minute and said it wasn’t her who did it.  I said something about how it is disrespectful to ruin someone’s neighborhood, and then…it was ON!  She lost it!  She started screaming at me about how she hates litter too, but I don’t know what it’s like to have kids, they put everything in their mouth, (excuse, excuse, excuse!).  I got all fired up and told her that I am a mom as well, and I would never teach my children that littering is okay.  “And that is exactly what you are doing,…teaching them that it is okay.”  Meanwhile, her poor little girls are just staring at me like, “what... is... HAPPENING!”   The fight kept going and going!  At one point I just leaned against the wall and let her yell at me.  It was ugly.

So here’s the lesson.  I felt terrible the whole rest of the day.  Not because I said something to her, but because I fought with her.  I hate confrontation, and I am really not the kind of person who likes to be mean.  But I was crazy to think that we wouldn’t end up fighting.  What did I think, that she was going to say? “You know what?  You’re right!  I shouldn’t litter.  Thank you for teaching me such an important life lesson.  Who knew I would grow so much, here, in the middle of a CostCo parking lot!!  Do take care!”  I should have just picked the litter up, maybe made some eye contact, and walked away.  Or even gone the extra mile and say, “I know how crazy it can get with kids, so I’ll throw this away for you.”  Even if I’m thinking, “What’s wrong with you, you selfish idiot?!”

All in all it felt good to say something  I would have festered just as much that night if I didn’t say something.  And like my cousin said, “She’s touching the gross trash anyway, she couldn’t walk the few feet to the trash cans at the front of the store?”  I know I was right, I just went about it wrong.  What’s that great quote?

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to say nothing.”

My new favorite piece of litter.  Found on a hike in Griffith Park.

Total depressing environmental fact:

Cigarette butts are one of the most commonly littered items in the world.  According to a

survey conducted by the County of Los Angeles Department of Public Works, County residents drop a

cigarette butt on the ground almost 600,000 times per month.  That’s more than seven million cigarette

butts per year."