Isn’t this the usual though? Walk blindly by the problems when they are small until they explode and spill the guts all over you.
Years ago when I worked with the telecommunications giant, I was in the Ladies’ Room one lunchtime with several other women who were unknown to me. As best as I can remember, we were all within the mid to late twenties, early to mid-thirties age group. One woman washed her hands and then dried them with the paper towels provided, and that was before the drying machines were installed all over.
When she finished drying her hands, she dumped the soiled towels on the floor within close proximity to the garbage bins. Another young woman who might have known her, said to her, “Why don’t you throw your garbage in the bins,” and I quote loosely.
“Oh, they hired people to clean this up,” (quoting loosely again) she said and shrugged her shoulders all nonchalant like that was acceptable behaviour.
I was always very detached at the time, trying not to get involved and the switchboard was calling so I washed my hands and disposed of my garbage like I was taught and exited.
Numerous times over the decades I remember hearing stories of parents being upset because their children had to pick up ‘bits of paper lying on the floor’ at school and paid visits to ‘cuss-off’ teacher because ‘har pickney not no damn maid.’
I have lived in several areas close enough to the Sandy Gully to witness when it rains how the millions of plastic bottles, glass bottles, cans, other kinds of garbage would be thunderous on its approach shortly after the rain clouds burst over the hills.
When the state-run entity of garbage collectors failed to pick up the garbage, which they often do, and I had garbage piled in the bin at the gate for the dogs to turn over, I remember a man, a passerby, asking why don’t I throw the garbage over the gully and I would see people driving down to the gully to dispose of their garbage quite often, including cuttings from trees and bushes, especially by the gardeners.
You drive alongside the gullies and it’s not rocket science to correctly assume that the piles of garbage in the gully matchup with the houses they are piled up beside.
I have often heard stories of people, even some women, who dump the garbage as they drive along because their cars ‘too nice to keep the garbage’ until they reach home or where it can be dumped appropriately when all they need to do is keep a bag in the car to keep the garbage contained.
Everybody saw the garbage piling up. Everybody!
Unless you're blind or really detached and unconcerned.
We like to talk loudly and long after the fact so that we won’t be thought of as being part of the problem and maybe we are not, but if we are speaking loudly about it in an attempt to detach ourselves that might not work because if we are a part of the problem people already know us to be a part of the problem because we are very good at pointing fingers and pretending it is everybody else but me.
We see everybody else's nastiness and we don't see our own.
Every time it rains heavily, Sandy Gully becomes a swill of garbage that the offenders probably feel goes nowhere.
Perhaps Marcus Garvey Drive is the 'nowhere' it goes to.