Trash in city

Editor,

Every morning when I walk my puppies I find all manner of trash that has accumulated overnight on my block. Beer cans, water bottles, paper trash, etc. Is this mess from people who live here?

It may be a small matter to some, who don’t mind living in a trash dump, but it is an indication that a certain sense of community is lacking. I spent years working as a volunteer on the sheriff’s graffiti abatement unit, trying to make Tulare County a better place.

Once, I was spraying over some gang graffiti on a wall, and a citizen came up to me and said “Why bother, they’ll only do it again.” My reply was, “If your dog did his business in the middle of your bed, would you just leave it and say he would only do it again?”

Yes, it would be nice to educate the dog. It would be nice to develop a sense of community where people did not regard Porterville as their personal trash can, but until then, why do we put up with it?

There are 60,000 people here. If only half of our citizens picked up only one piece of trash a day, that would be over 200,000 pieces of trash gone from our community every week! I’d say we’d have a pretty clean city! Pretty soon, people would have to start really looking to find trash. Maybe the people throwing it down might even realize that they are not very good citizens and start thinking before they mess up a clean neighborhood?

The word “community” refers to us all living together, and living together, it would seem to me to bear with it some personal responsability to make it a place worth living in.

What would it take to spend a couple of minutes a day to pick up one piece of trash to make Porterville more livable? Is it worth doing?

Bill Warner Porterville