Trash Bag City

The senior pastor at my church sends out an e-mail letter every week, and this past week's had a raw honesty to it that was very moving. In services yesterday, he sort of apologized for it--in part because someone on his staff had inadvertently sent it to the Times-Pic and they ran it yesterday. His apology was that it was sort of downhearted in a way that he doesn't like to be. But aren't we all a bit downhearted on some days in this city?

An interesting part of the article was his reference to a friend who had a trash-related meltdown in a fast-food drive-thru lane, which, strangely, had to be the same person referred to in a recent Chris Rose rant about trash (sorry, the nola.com links aren't working today). The friend tried to yell some sense of shame into a woman throwing her Popeye's bag and napkins onto the ground in the parking lot.

I don't know where this is all going, really, except that a lot of the people here are thoughtless and don't care, and there's no respect for property or pride of place. And that was true before Katrina, and, sadly, it's true now. I thought about it as I picked up some yahoo's Rallyburger wrapper from my front yard and two textbooks from the street in front of my house--some kid must have really been sick of the American Revolution. I added them to the two McDonald's cups already in my trashcan that I'd picked up a few days ago. One of my neighbors, bless him, spends a half hour every morning picking up every stray piece of trash in a two or three-block radius.

And when we all have so much to do just to keep up with our own crap, it gets pretty old having to take care of someone else's.