We don’t live in the best neighborhood.

It’s definitely not the worst: our house is on a multi-block stretch of single family homes, built in the 1950s, mostly owned by the people living in them. A large elementary/middle school is around the corner, and a charter school specializing in serving autistic students a block over from that. There is a very large church, and a public library. On another block in another direction is a Boys and Girls Club and a branch campus of the local community college. A lot of the people around here are very nice — our neighbors on either side are lovely — and the majority of the homes are well-maintained; there are lots of dogs, and only a couple of asshole owners who let their dogs roam around loose. We used to have a feral cat problem but it seems to have waned — though maybe they just started shitting somewhere else after we covered over our desert-dirt-sand yard (which the feral cats saw as a very large litter box) with 11 tons of pointy landscaping rocks. Either way I’m happier with less cat shit in my yard.

But about a block away is an apartment complex that seems to get very frequent visits from the police, and sometimes from the coroner. Next to it is a convenience store that appears to be mostly convenient for armed robbers. The long, straight roads to either side of us are very popular with street racers and people who want to make their engines sound VERY loud late at night, and during the daytime, we get regular fly-overs from the nearby Air Force base. Running behind all of the houses on our block (and most of the blocks in the neighborhood) are alleys where there are large communal trash cans; sometimes people drive down the alley and dump illicit trash into our shared can. Yet those trash dumpers never clean up the weeds and detritus in the alley. And nor do my neighbors. That big ol’ trash can is also directly behind our house and so sometimes gets aromatic for us. Two different houses nearby have been condemned in the last year, presumably because they were used to cook drugs; most likely meth, but I don’t know if they have fentanyl cooking sites like meth cooking sites — or hell, maybe even crack is making a comeback. One of them has been bought and is being rebuilt, which is great; but the other sits empty, windows boarded up, and some of the large and ever-growing homeless population in Tucson lives thereabouts, and so leaves large piles of broken and dirty possessions around the yard and the carport. Several members of that homeless population frequent the alleys and the streets in this area, not to mention the mentally ill drug addict who lives with — maybe his brother? — in the house on the other side of the alley from us. He climbs over the wall into the alley sometimes, goes off somewhere, and climbs back in later; sometimes we see him out on the street dancing to no music, or ranting loudly to no audience but the voices in his head. Sometimes he gets in arguments with his housemate/brother, who works and probably provides for them both. We don’t know the whole situation, but it seems very sad for all involved – including, tangentially, us, because it is difficult to have a man screaming at the top of his lungs and then jumping a wall into an alley (separated from your house only by an eminently jumpable fence), presumably to go buy drugs.

I like that even less than the cat shit.

And then there’s the trash.

There’s a lot of trash floating around. Not just in my neighborhood: one of my (many) duties at school is advising the National Honor Society chapter, which has adopted the road the school sits on; twice a year we pick up trash on that road, and there is always more trash, always enough to fill a couple of VERY large heavy duty plastic trash bags. I sometimes wish I could get the students in my NHS chapter down to pick up my neighborhood, but I have promised all of my students that if they ever come to my house, I will egg them (And if you’re one of my students and you’re reading this, I mean it. Track me down from the description of my neighborhood, and I will egg you mercilessly.), and that would just make an even bigger mess. There’s enough mess already: some of it is spillover from the large communal trashcans, and some is from the homeless folks, and much of it is from the schoolchildren, and the majority is probably just litter from passersby in cars or city buses. There’s a wash next to the church, and it has been a homeless encampment several times in the past as well as a dumping ground, mostly from people moving out of the apartments nearby who don’t want to carry all of their belongings away with them — or maybe it’s after they get evicted and it’s the landlords dumping all of their possessions in lieu of donating them to Goodwill; which is, admittedly, two blocks farther away than the wash, and therefore way less convenient. My wife and I, who frequently walk in our neighborhood, often wonder why the church never cleans up the trash in the wash: let alone taking care of the people who sometimes live in the wash, or along the levee a half-mile south of us. Wasn’t there something in the Bible about taking care of the poor?

I personally encounter most of the trash on those walks with my wife, or the other ones I take with my dogs. My dogs, luckily, are spoiled and overfed enough that they don’t eat the food refuse we come across (As long as I can pull them away quickly enough), but they always give it a nice sniff, along with the various piles of animal feces that are common all along the roads here. I know they find both the litter and the scat fascinating, but I can’t help but feel anxious and also a bit guilty: surely I shouldn’t let them sniff that awful stuff; what if it has germs? What if they do decide to sample the food, and it happens to be rotten or bacteria-ridden — or even poisoned? Or what if they just press their noses into the trash, into the feces, and then later press their noses against me, or my wife? I mean, ew. All the ew. So I keep a careful eye — a very careful eye — on them on our walks and I pull them away from anything gross.

And of course, I pick up their poop. And I make sure to bag my trash so little pieces of detritus don’t go flying away when the can gets dumped.

And then this past summer, I started picking up trash while I was walking the dogs.

It was pretty easy, even though I walk with two dogs on two leashes, one on each wrist; I grabbed an extra plastic bag from the grocery store (Just like every other person, I have a bag filled with bags in my pantry), held it with one hand, grabbed trash with the other hand. You can see that I tied it shut and carried it with one finger; it wasn’t heavy. I had to yank on the dogs a few times when they wanted to keep going while I was pausing to grab a piece of trash; but considering how often they pause to sniff (Especially the fuzzy one in the shadows on the left), I had plenty of opportunities. Too many opportunities, in fact: I filled the bag long before I finished the walk, long before I ran out of trash to pick up. But I left the other trash where it was; I just picked up one small grocery bag worth of garbage.

And then another, the next time we walked.

And another bag, the time after that.

And I kept doing that. Several times I found plastic grocery bags on the walk, and kept them for the next time if they weren’t torn or dirty — so I didn’t even use up all of my bag of bags! Still got ’em! Sometimes I got ambitious and filled more than one grocery bag, and a couple of times I found bigger trashbags, the white kitchen trashbags with drawstrings, and I picked up even more trash. I walked the dogs every two or three days, just around my neighborhood, never very far (They are old — though of course they are still baby baby puppies); there was always trash to pick up. I took a photo each time because I wanted to write this post about the whole thing. Here they are:

(Sorry they’re all turned sideways; I had trouble with the editing option on WordPress here — and I refused to use the AI editor.)

So as you can see, I managed to pick up a lot of trash this summer.

And now, of course, when I take my walks, I find… a lot of trash. To no one’s surprise: I live in a city, and as I described, there are a large number of sources of the litter that is strewn across my neighborhood. I’m only one person, and I don’t walk that often, especially not once school started up again.

But this summer, at least, there was less trash in my neighborhood. My street and the streets directly around me were a bit cleaner. And, judging based on the road cleanups I have done for the last five years with NHS, my collection of trash would lead to less trash all the time: the first time we picked up our road we filled a dozen huge trashbags; the last two times, it was one or two bags. The trash collected, probably for years, before we started, and while new trash got littered in between our pickups, we reduced the backlog, and the new trash was much more manageable. And is it possible that people who live along the road we clean up noticed what we were doing and maybe got a little more careful with their trash, or even picked some up themselves? Sure: we have been thanked, several times, by residents who notice us out there in our orange hi-visibility vests, trudging along with bags of garbage and wearing rubber gloves. I’m confident that, if I keep picking up trash in my neighborhood, there will be less trash over time. The neighborhood will get better. A little cleaner, a little nicer to walk in, a little nicer to live in.

Now let me reveal the truth here: this is not a post about picking up trash. It’s a post about politics. About the upcoming election. And about doing something to make our neighborhood — in this case our country — a little better, a little cleaner. A little nicer to live in.

I’m not going to say that voting in the election is a citizen’s duty; I think it is, but I recognize that “duty” can be a heavy word, and not something that people easily accept — and that’s a good thing, because a duty is an obligation, and we shouldn’t take on obligations just because some yutz on the internet tells us we should. (Not even when the yutz in question is a splendid writer and a delightful person, with two very cute dogs and an awesome tortoise.) Obligations accrue, but generally don’t fade away — sort of like garbage in a neighborhood. I have not accepted that trash pickup is my duty; it is something I am willing to do, sometimes, but not my obligation.

So what I’m saying is that voting is something you should be willing to do. Just like my trash pickups on my dog walks, it’s not hard; sure, you can get really into it, just like I could get serious about the trash pickups (I will say that I did get serious once: there’s a little footbridge across a wash in a park down the block, and some asshat shattered several beer and liquor bottles on the cement surface. There were shards of glass EVERYWHERE, and I had to turn around and take the dogs the other way. That pissed me off: so after we finished the walk, I went back with a trashcan and a dustpan and whisk broom, and I swept up all of the glass.), and you can research every candidate and every race and every proposition and every county acquisition and every rule change and everything you are voting on. That would be amazing: the more you do, the better the result will be.

But also, there will always be more trash. It’s better to do a little often, and then relax. If you don’t exhaust yourself, don’t get burnt out, you can keep going out and doing the easy thing indefinitely. Make it a habit, and it will get even easier; it will get unconscious, and won’t feel like a chore at all. And it will make a difference, over time, because you will make things better directly, and the past buildup of garbage will be reduced: and you might inspire others to do good things as well. Maybe even the people you’re voting for.

I’m quite serious: it has become clear to me that our politicians are most interested in keeping their positions, above all other considerations. I have watched Republicans, many of them probably quite sincere in their patriotism, fall in line as Donald Trump has led this nation downhill towards a flaming junkyard built on top of a sewage pit, only because they didn’t want to get primaried by MAGA. They have violated their own morals again and again and again, accepting a liar and rapist and conman who is destroying everything that conservatives hold dear — our military dominance, our wealth, our moral standing among nations (or at least the appearance of moral standing). They passed a Russia sanction bill NAMED AFTER LINDSEY GRAHAM, and that fucking guy broke it to give Putin the gift of not only billions of dollars, but also pressuring other nations to lift sanctions on Russia, to go along with the ones he just broke himself. And though the Republicans in Congress are complaining, I guess, we all know they’re not going to do anything serious like refuse to vote for his bills or his nominees, or impeach or even censure him. Because they want to keep their positions, even as they watch their country go down into the flaming shit because of the guy they propped up in order to get his voting base to help them, too. And I don’t think most of the Democrats are any better, not in terms of their priorities: number one is keeping their seat. Period. Very few exceptions.

This means two things: first, if they want to keep their seats, then the thing they fear, the only thing they fear, is a motivated voting populace. The Republicans are worse about it, because they actively try to suppress votes; but the Democrats didn’t pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act even when they had both houses of Congress and the White House in 2021, so I don’t think they’re doing much better at promoting a motivated voting populace. A motivated voting populace means that they need to actually work to please those voters. When nobody votes, it’s easier for them to do nothing and accomplish nothing and still keep their seats; but if we vote, if we vote consistently every election, then even if our specific votes in any given year don’t make a tangible change, the fact that numbers of us are voting makes the politicians have to pay attention to what we want, rather than what their donors want. That’s good. And secondly, voting in this country can still make a direct change. Remember that Trump has won — legitimately won — two Presidential elections, and that is the reason why he has power. The only reason, as clearly that shit-flinging gibbon couldn’t work his way into any position of authority that didn’t rest on — the choice of a motivated voting populace which he could manipulate with his cheap conman tricks. People voted: that’s how we got Trump. It’s also how we got Biden in 2020, and thank God we did: imagine if he had been doing this shit to an economy that never recovered from the pandemic.

When you vote, you help make the country better. You also help to clean up some of the shit that has built up in our political sphere. And both of those are good things. And what’s more, voting isn’t hard, and needn’t be an onerous duty: just set yourself up with an easy way to manage it, and get it done.

Help us all take out the trash, and see that it goes all the way to the dump.

Thanks.