Don’t talk trash, do something about it

Don’t mess with Texas.

It’s supposed to be an anti-littering campaign slogan. It’s won many advertising awards and national acclaim.

In reality, it’s little more than a kitschy catchphrase. When it comes to litter, Texas is one of the most messed up places I know. I first moved to Texas in November of 2005. I lived in Amarillo for the first three years.

For those who don’t know, it’s very windy in the Texas Panhandle. Litter is everywhere. At first I thought the problem was largely unintentional with the wind blowing it out of trucks and trashcans and what not. The alley behind the house I lived in resembled a pathway carved through a landfill.

Our Boy Scout troop each month picked up trash from around a lake in one of the city parks. It was there that I became convinced that the volume of trash was not accidental. There was a lot of intentional dumping going on. It was the same with casual littering. People just don’t care.

My family moved to Rosenberg in 2008. We live in an older part of town. As far as I know, no one in my family drinks beer, smokes cigars or cigarettes or plays the lottery. Yet, every day my front and side yards are littered with the stuff. That’s in addition to a lot of other debris.

The Cub Scout pack we belonged to sponsored a road and a few times a year we would go out and collect trash. There was always a lot more stuff than we could handle. If an item was too big or dangerous to deal with, we had to leave it. Cigarette butts were too numerous to waste our time on.

When I worked in Waller County, I had an occasion to do more than one story about illegal dumping. There were a handful of properties the county desperately wanted to clean because they were nuisances and health risks, but the property owners resisted.

One of the first stories I did here in Sealy was about illegal dumping going on in a creek in Stephen F. Austin State Park. Every morning when I pull up to the office, I’m confronted with litter than has blown into the fence and field next to our building. It’s disgusting.

Then, last week, Sheila Ellis came into the office to report some illegal dumping going on not far from here on Harrison Road. I checked it out. Mattresses, recliners, boards, roofing materials and more line a portion of the road.

There is hardly a day that goes by where I don’t see some smoker flick a smoldering cigarette butt out the window of their car onto the road. Hey, stupid people: That’s littering! Stop it!

Let’s face it – the Don’t Mess With Texas slogan doesn’t work. Too many people living in Texas seem to feel it’s OK to dump what they want, where they want, whenever they want.  I’ve lived in three other states and have traveled across most of the country. The only place I’ve seen that’s filthier than Texas is the northeast part of the country from Philadelphia (or Filthadelphia) to New York.

I try to do my part to keep Texas clean. Trust me, I pick up and throw away a lot more trash than I produce. I honestly don’t know what it takes to get the message through to some people that they’re only hurting themselves but others and the environment when they feel it’s their right to dispose of their refuse on the roadside.

Maybe part of the answer is to raise fines and to mandate several hours of hard labor cleaning up roadsides and ditches for those convicted of the crime. Imagine if the simple act of tossing a cigarette butt were to result in an automatic $500 fine and 40 hours of trash duty. Then go up from there for bigger offenses. Somehow I think people would think twice before they messed with Texas.