COLUMN: Litter consciousness is thing of the past
I generally hate acronyms because they are so hard to keep track of and generally imply you are part of some inner-circle of wisdom. They also lead to comical tongue twisters such as “get me the ASPCA ASAP.” I’ll make an exception for a new one I’ve latched onto – MOOP (Matter Out of Place.)
It puts that modern Caucasian hip-hop twist on good, old “littering.” Remember littering? Remember the crying Native American guy in the commercial showing the trashed shoreline of the Hudson River? When was the last time you saw an anti-littering commercial on television? Probably about the same time you saw an ad depicting the refreshing health benefits of smoking and a shot of Wild Turkey on the way home from work.
I doubt that the lack of public service announcements is because we have solved the MOOP problem. After driving 5,000 miles over the last month, I know that isn’t true; we have just stopped seeing it. While on one level, recycling laws have helped reduce waste, there is a whole other group of yahoo miscreants who now think that throwing cans out the window is just their way of creating jobs. It’s true that Jimmy’s Gyro Hut gets free advertising to clean up a section of highway, but they generally only pick up the trash three times a year. Let’s let Jimmy buy some newspaper print ads and get back to making Gyros instead of making him and his staff double as sanitation engineers.
There apparently is no real correlation between godliness and cleanliness because the MOOP doesn’t stop on the Utah border. Neither is there a correlation between education and littering. Every time the student paper has an insert, hundreds of students play the “oops, I didn’t notice that I dropped that” game.
I have started to analyze MOOP as a way to pass the time. There seems to be something about beer and soft drinks that leads to most of the littering. It must be something akin to throwing a drumstick over your shoulder in medieval times that makes people do it. The only difference is that in medieval times there were dogs around to eat the discards.
Everybody who smokes seems to think the world is their ashtray and that somehow the butts are either biodegradable or food for nicotine-starved seagulls. I guess since we have driven smokers out of all the public buildings, they are driving around flicking their butts at the disapproving world. I have no rational or polite explanation for the number of bottles full of urine I am starting to see on the sides of the road, but please stop it. You can also keep the disposable diapers to yourself.
It’s all about ownership and some misdirected juvenile game of “you touched it last.” It is hard to remember the last time I saw someone who was not dressed in a prison-issued, orange jumpsuit, part of an adopt-a-highway program or homeless actually picking something up. There is a little-known loophole in the law that actually allows you to pick up MOOP that you did not drop and are not getting paid or in any way compensated for disposing of.
Of course, what is mere MOOP compared to all the chemical and nuclear waste Utah has become home to? Maybe people are just taking the attitude; “the rest of the country is dumping here, why not me? It’s kind of hard to get the Boy Scouts to start an adopt-a-nerve-gas-depot program.
Maybe there is some other planet that would like to adopt the Earth. Imagine the signage “This sector of the universe adopted by Remulack Warp Drive Discount Warehouse.”
Dennis Hinkamp is a USU employee in the Extension office. Comments can be sent to dennish@ext.usu.edu.