America the Beautiful...and full of trash!

     Hello, America!  What an awesome summer and fun in the sun!  Waterparks, beaches, vacations, visits with friends and relatives, fireworks, fishing, and swimming -- hey, it's a fantastic time for families to have during the summer, bonding, building close relationships, and enjoying the great outdoors.  I have so many fond memories of summer, and I really enjoyed being outdoors as a kid.  Yeah, childhood was great when I had few responsibilities and the freedom to roam and play with friends in smalltown USA.  The country seemed like country, and small towns seemed so safe that many people didn't bother to even lock their doors at night.  Of course, that all ended with the murder of a country family just outside of town....who also didn't seem to worry about locking their doors at night, either.  Well, we still had Halloween to look forward to in the fall,...but then that got ruined after some jerks did stuff like glass in pixie sticks and razor blades in apples.  It's sad how a few, psychotic individuals can ruin life's simple pleasures for millions of others, isn't it?

       There's another sorrow to ad to the list, now: the trashing of America.  Remember those old TV commercials with the native american on horseback shedding a tear as he looked out upon all the trash in a once-beautiful land?  Well, we need some more of that type of wake-up call.  Yeah, America -- especially in some places -- started doing pretty well at cleaning up after herself for awhile it seemed, but somehow that's been rather lost in the hustle and bustle of our ever so modern society.  I remember that my first big wake-up call had to do with glass.  One summer, we were at a park and tubing down the stream was the order of the day.  It was a beautiful creek out in the country, and when my friend and I came to a big log, he unfortunately decided to go under it rather than over the top, if I remember correctly.  He soon was on his way to get quite a few stitches in his hand, after apparently slicing it open on some glass in the creekbed.  That began somewhat of a hatred of glass, for me.  Hey, it may be of some usefulness for good, but why not use ceramic, instead, which doesn't break into such vicious shards, slivers and sharp edges?  Certainly that would be difficult with things like automobile windshields, but there are many other items which could easily be produced in another, less dangerous form.   Ever try gardening, running your fingers into that rich soil full of goodness and nourishment for your home-grown vegetables or flower-beds?  As a kid, it was fun to play with the earthworms, too, not to mention how great they were for fishing.  Ahem,...ever try gardening with bare hands in a place were there just so happens to be an old, fragmented glass bottle?  I don't even want to think of it.  Yep,...I hate glass.  What about when somebody drops one, and someone going barefoot in the house gets a tiny sliver in a toe?  It seems like the most painful tweezers-work of all -- much worse than a mere thorn of some kind, right?  Even plastic would be far better as far as I'm concerned!

       Plastic, -- ahhhh, the inocuous, innocent, forever-material : if only we could really be willing to recycle the stuff!  You go to the jetty to fish, and lines from years gone by (it seems) are tracing out into the deep all over the place.  I hope I never fall in.  It would be a special feat just to keep from getting tangled up in all those discarded lines and hooks in order to keep from drowning!  Those can-connector do-hickies used to kill sea-turtles, too, right?  Hmm, what about all the used milk and soda bottles : has anyone ever calculated how many times around the world they would go if all lined up, end-to-end?  I wonder how many feet of artificial height is in landfill areas due to all the plastic in the ground?  Hah, what a joke we've played on our grandkids and great grandkids, huh?  We've left them so much buried treasure all over the country, haven't we?  Won't they be so thankful?  Can you imagine fifty to a hundred years from now, when they go out to plant a garden, the surprise on their faces?  Hey, we must have been very thoughtful, since plastic is good at holding in the moisture, right, and the earthworms will thrive in all the newspaper composting under ground -- that is, if they can crawl across the shards of broken glass bottles without slicing themselves in half.

       Yes, we have left them all a bonanza, and I haven't even mentioned all the chemicals, have I?  Still, we haven't finished with the treasures  a-b-o-v-e  ground!  This latest one is a mystery, as I don't recall having EVER seen it when I was growing up, but then again, in those days, we had fewer throw-away items of the sort.  Did you guess?  Oh yes, I'm talking about the dirty diapers people are leaving in America's parking lots!  Now who would ever think that someone would have to be TOLD, ..."I don't want to get out of my car and step on your kid's %#@$ dirty diaper!"  I don't want to see it or look at it.  If you can't understand that, then we have a problem.  Look, you are NOT too fat, poor, rich, crippled, psychologically-impaired or whatever to put that filthy thing in the trash, somewhere.  I and all the other patrons at the grocery store, mall, convenience store or wherever do not want to find it in the parking lot, okay?  Do we need multilingual signs for that, just to be sure everyone knows it?

        C'mon, America, enough's enough already.  We're not THAT "too busy" that we can't even step four feet out of our way to put trash in a trash can, okay?  I think we need to start some enforcement changes, because I don't like what it's all starting to look like.  I think we need to make those responsible for making some of these products that trash the countryside also responsible for recycling them.   I don't want our "purple mountain majesties" and our "amber waves of grain" to be mere veneers covering the trash that has been pushed onto us and in our grounds by careless, thoughtless, greedy modern robber-barons who only think about turning a profit at the expense of us, our children, our grandchildren and any other future generations.  When I was growing up, we had a rule that each of us kids had to clean up after ourselves -- if we made a mess, it was our responsibility to clean it up.  What is the difference?  We need to be responsible and pick up after ourselves, and that doesn't mean just shoving all our trash into a big hole in the ground where we can't see it!  That's no better than when the kid who's told to clean up his room just goes in and shoves everthing under the bed or crams it all into the closet.  It's like the dirty secrets of crooked corporations who figure "whatever people don't know won't hurt them."  We need to do something, now.  It's already way too late and way overdue, but America, we need to do something and do it now.  I LOVE the outdoors.  I don't want my kids or grandkids inheriting a trash-dump of a country.  I want America to still be oh so...beautiful.