My building has a little garden in front with a low wall people can sit on. Isn’t it nice to provide space for people to take a load off?

I’m sure most of them don’t, but plenty leave their garbage in our little garden. Here are some pictures from a typical morning. The “Rite-a-way” box is rat poison I don’t like that the superintendent puts there, but with all the garbage people put there, rats arrive.

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The plants on this side of the garden are all dead. They were verdant and abundant at first. The most common garbage types are

• Beer cans
• Soda cans
• Water bottles
• Coffee cups and lids
• Napkins
• Bags
• Lottery tickets, usually ripped up
• Doof wrappers: chips, candy bars, etc
• Little alcohol bottles
• Straws
• Bottle caps

I forget the rest. I suspect people pour out a lot of beverages into the dirt.

I pick must of it up every time I come and go. I’ve never seen anyone else from my building pick it up, though the maintenance crew must sometimes. I should mention, there’s a municipal garbage can a few yards away.

Last night I saw a woman pick her dog up and put it in the garden to pee. I asked the doorman if she was from the building. When she saw me talking to him, she said, “I’m just letting my dog pee,” as if it was normal to put your dog on another person’s property to pee. Why not just let the dog pee in your own apartment?

I try to empathize with people who leave their garbage there. I think littering in someone’s space is different than on the sidewalk. I figure they think, “This is an expensive neighborhood. They’re rich. They can deal with it,” or maybe even, “They deserve it.”

Maybe they think, “What else am I supposed to do? I can’t deal with all the waste either?”

When I have garbage in my hand, I feel an urge to put it somewhere. I think many times people just want to put it somewhere that it feels like “I put it somewhere,” and then they stop thinking about it.

While it’s just one space, I think this behavior, multiplied by hundreds of millions of citizens in this country and billions globally, is what our founders had in mind to protect from the breakdown of society. Why participate in society if what you create can be destroyed with impunity? It’s why we have a fifth amendment designed to protect citizens from being deprived of life, liberty, and property.

Did I say multiplied by billions? I meant also repeated in much more polluting and depleting ways, like car and plane exhaust.

Is convenience worth trashing the Constitution?

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Here are more pictures from the morning I took the one above. I’ll take more over time.

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EDIT: These trees used to be lush. Partly there are fewer leaves because it’s fall and partly because there was scaffolding for over a years that blocked the light. But the trees in front are dead. They cleared away other dead trees. Since the trees farther from where people sit aren’t dead, I conclude people killed the trees with their garbage.

I’ll have to take another picture lower down, showing the dead or missing shrubbery they also killed.

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Here’s more garbage. Again, there’s more daily. I didn’t set a schedule on when to take pictures, just sometimes. First you see the bottle in the bag, then the matches, then the litter in the soil, especially by the rat poison, then you notice all the spilled liquid around the bottle.

All that bare soil was covered in the shrubbery I mentioned above. It all died, or rather it was killed.

• ← More gratuitous destruction of life, liberty, and property in my neighborhood
• This week’s selected media, November 9, 2025: “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound”, Tora! Tora! Tora!, At the Heart of the White Rose →