Bottles, cups belong in the trash

There I was, walking down Main Street on the west side of Portland with a Bud Light bottle in each hand.

It wasn’t exactly a moment I’d prefer to have blasted around the internet on Instagram or whatever.

But that’s the risk you run when you pick up litter.

I was making my way back to the office after a trip to the bank when I spotted the two bottles perched on the curb in front of the building that used to be the home of Tom and Rod’s bar and steakhouse in Portland.

Floodwaters did extensive damage to the building several years ago, closing the business and leaving the eventual fate of the structure still something of a mystery.

Apparently, someone felt it was still a good place to have a drink, even if it meant sitting on the sidewalk.

It was a Monday afternoon. The bottles were remnants from a weekend celebration.

And while the glass might have been crafted by the best darned bottlemakers in the U.S. at Dunkirk’s Ardagh plant, by the time I found them they were trash.

To my surprise, they weren’t empty. The last of the Bud Light was dumped in the gutter, and there I was walking back to the office with a bottle in each hand.

That time it was bottles.

About a week later it was a Polar Pop cup, something that seems to be a favorite among the county’s litterbugs.

This time around, the cup was on the sidewalk outside the Purdue Extension Office and there was no way I was going to ignore it.

Instead, it was a matter of picking it up, finding a trash container a few feet away, and putting it where it belonged.

Why, I wondered, why is that so hard?

What is it in someone’s genetic make-up that makes a person believe the world is his or her dumpster?

Obviously, there’s a degree of cluelessness involved. (That’s a polite way of saying that littering is an act of stupidity.)

But there are plenty of clueless people who still recognize that littering is unacceptable.

Smoking may be a factor.

Smokers — and I was one back in the day — get into the habit of tossing their cigarette butts everywhere: Out of the car window, onto the ground, you name it.

But there are also plenty of smokers who wouldn’t think of doing something like that.

Rebellion or assertion of one’s individuality may also play a role.

Is there any gesture that says “It’s all about me” more than tossing trash out a car window? It’s like giving the finger to the rest of humanity.

Years ago, while working in the yard, I heard a crash.

Some young people had been going by, walking in the street, three guys and two girls. And one of the guys had thought it would be cool to smash a pop bottle on the pavement. Guess he wanted to impress the girls.

I was younger then and a little foolhardy, so I set off down the street after the group, saying, “I think you dropped something.”

When I caught up with them, the guys were embarrassed. 

They knew instantly they had done something wrong. The girls, however, jeered them when the guys came back down the street to help me clean up the mess. Apparently smashing pop bottles was some sort of display of manhood.

I told that story to an old friend a few weeks back, and she told me I was crazy. I should have just let it go.

But 30 seconds later she told a story of her own about following a car that was littering around town and calling 911 to report it.

My guess is she picks up Polar Pop cups when she finds them too.