“The plural of anecdote is data.”
Well, that’s what UC Berkeley professor, Raymond Wolfinger, said, and it makes some sense.
Leaving Planet Fitness today, the slob in front of me, casually and energetically, threw a coffee cup out of the car window. I realize this is one anecdote, but I don’t recall ever seeing such blatant and nonchalant littering. The North Olmsted Police Department is across the street from our location.
I know that teenagers throw shit around, people can be careless and vandalism exists. I live next to an interstate with 20,000 cars passing every day. A couple of times per year, I pick up trash that washes down the hill from the highway. I do this because in the late Fall and early Spring, when most of the leaves have fallen. The trash looks crappy, so I climb over the fence and pick it up. Along about 800 ft of highway, I fill a large garbage bag or two, along with large thing like a pallet or semi tire retread. That isn’t much litter from 3 million cars going by.
In my lifetime, America has been a pretty clean place. That crying Indian, “Keep America Beautiful” commercial really worked. We aren’t at Singapore levels of clean, but in general, Americans are less likely to throw trash around than all of South or Central America, all of Africa and half of Europe.
It’s one anecdote, and maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Our culture is deteriorating, our president is a dotard, we have an invasion at our Southern border and much of our governmental leaders are negligent in their duties. I can’t help feeling this anecdote is a data point in an unpleasant general trend.
My dashcam caught the infraction.