The great Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant, understood the role of athletics at a respected institution of intellect and academics: “It’s kind of hard to rally around a math class.”
That’s how I’ve always felt about rallying around a litter cleanup. Since I was a young boy, I watched in awe as those around me, and around the nation, felt excited and empowered and electrified by the notion of coming together as one – and cleaning up the litter.
Feeding the hungry, educating the poor, helping newspaper editors with their spelling – those kinds of chores seemed ordained by God. But prowling the mean streets of some awful urban nightmare, looking for used condoms and needles and yesterday’s take-out meal, never sparked any transcendent spirit in me.
Over time, I thought I would outgrow my immaturity about the sanctity of litter cleanup. I was wrong.
There it was: Loving news coverage and commentary about a major litter cleanup in bedraggled Lawrence, with dozens or hundreds or thousands or millions of volunteers gleefully scooping up the junk. They did so on the theory that litter cleanup not only spruced up the neighborhood, but also built a community spirit that you wouldn’t find in Brookline, where the neighbors mowed lawns or raked the leaves, in sullen, suburban solitude.
As one young organizer told The Boston Globe, perhaps the campaign would “change Lawrence’s negative image,” would “boost morale,” would “change the outlook people have.”
What’s wrong with me? I understand this young man’s impulse; I appreciate his decision to clean up the mess, as opposed to robbing a bank or selling a portfolio of dubious mortgages. But, a high-profile cleanup campaign won’t change the negative image of Lawrence, if that is what it has. The litter cleanup will emphasize, to outsiders, that the city is full of irresponsible litterers, who must be picked up after to avoid civic embarrassment.
Philosophical Junk
In my desperate psychological struggle to come to terms with litter cleanup aversion, I often turn to esoteric philosophy, which is sufficiently puzzling to divert attention from the fact that if you pick up a tin can sitting in the middle of the street, then it is no longer sitting in the middle of the street – which is, one supposes, a good thing.
My intellectual problem with expending too much time and energy on litter cleanup is that it focuses on the symptoms, not the disease. The community might well be a somewhat better place after the syringes are disposed of – but only for an hour or two. As Ronald Reagan said of government: It doesn’t tend to solve problems, it only rearranges them. So it is with a litter campaign.
Given that one out of every 2.8 persons in the Boston-Cambridge colossus is a starving graduate student, it might have been interesting to conduct a before-and-after survey of the good citizens of Lawrence. Did participating in the anti-litter moment somehow enhance their well being, or make them more perky, or help find them a new job as a Fidelity bond trader? Somerville, for instance, recently surveyed its residents to see how “satisfied” they are with life in general, even in the absence of marching against litter.
To be sure, there are academic cheerleaders for the kind of emotional bonding that might occur during and after the war against litter. Robert Putnam, the Harvard guru of “Bowling Alone” fame, went on and on about the value of “shared objectives” and “networks, norms, and trust” as important contributors to making the world go round.
The danger of these kinds of Lawrence community love-fests is that, with the exception of the perspiration and aching muscles, they are an easy way to avoid the hard work of research and resolution. Is the rubbish being produced by your slob-of-a-next-door-neighbor, or are hookers and addicts coming into the neighborhoods from somewhere else? Is it clear what, exactly, is “garbage,” to be picked up by municipal workers, as opposed to “litter,” left to the pigeons, squirrels and volunteers?
I can’t stand myself. God bless you, anti-litter warriors of Lawrence. Keep up the good work. There will be more litter tomorrow. That’s the problem though, isn’t it?
