The other day I was picking up litter in Washington Square Park, not making a big deal about it. I just do it as a matter of course.

Something happened that often does: people got annoyed at me. The details aren’t important, but they rudely approached and got angry at me. The interaction with me isn’t the point. Something they said, that many people say, is.

They said, “there are people whose job it is to do that,” implying I shouldn’t pick up the litter and that littering isn’t a problem because someone else gets paid to do it.

People feel entitled to throw trash on the ground. They don’t realize they’re causing taxes to go up, or fees to business improvement districts. The policy of hiring people to clean litter is leading people to feel entitled to litter more.

Many of these entitled people are poor. Some are probably homeless. It’s tempting to say we should be more tolerant with them. In many ways I support helping them, but I’m not here talking about all situations. I’m talking about putting trash into trash cans a few yards away instead of dropping it on the ground. Littering hurts everyone. For the reasons I wouldn’t tolerate someone punching someone innocent in the nose because they were poor, I don’t tolerate a sane adult from hurting innocent people by littering.

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For the record, the amount of trash in this picture is typical for most trash cans multiple times per day in Washington Square Park, as well as in many other parks and any public trash can.

• ← Followed up: watched recommended historical videos from the Leadership Institute’s course “Conservatism 101”
• Magnitude of suffering and death then and now →