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> throw his trash out the car window, which is what we city kids (and adults) used to do in the early 80s This must be an American thing. I do not recall this

> throw his trash out the car window, which is what we city kids (and adults) used to do in the early 80s This must be an American thing. I do not recall this being the case elsewhere that I visited.

fencepost 5y ago
There were real pushes from the early 70s on to combat pollution from many sources. One thing that many Americans will remember from then (or from seeing it later) is the "Crying Indian" ad from 1971. Pollution also made it into songs about little things like the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire that provided a lot of push for the passage of the Clean Water Act not long after.
- alaxsxaq 5y ago
  America solved a large part of air and water pollution issues as a side-effect of policies which shifted production largely off-shore. That solution won't work for the remainder. The trash problem seems to have worsened - especially in the cities. Municipal governments have eliminated street cleaning from their service portfolio and now seem to mostly rely on things getting so bad that some civil group sign on to their adopt-a-highway program and make some effort to clean things up once or twice a year. Hard to take care of the home when you're busy sending trillions to destroying people's lives in other parts of the world. The difficulty I have in looking optimistically toward the future comes from my lack of confidence in the leadership of this nation. An entrenched two-party system and a complicit media has led us to a place where we cannot adequately provide for basic human needs (education, health, and housing). Without caring for those things for all of the people living within our borders, the hard choices we will need to make are going to bring us through a period of turmoil as the pains of adjustment are felt unevenly throughout our society. Someone is going to lose and it probably won't be the rich and upper middle class. We will likely end up covering them for the loss of their beach-side property while the poor sod living in the countryside will be treated like we currently treat our homeless.
extra88 5y ago
If they were littering like that in the early 80s, their community was very much lagging behind the American culture overall. Or maybe it was just the people they were around literally being trashy. It wasn't, and isn't today, an American thing. Plenty of countries had, and even still do have, casual attitudes about littering.
GaryTang 5y ago
Visit India or South America, 10x worse now than the US was in the 80s.

> throw his trash out the car window, which is what we city kids (and adults) used to do in the early 80s This must be an American thing. I do not recall this being the case elsewhere that I visited.

fencepost 5y ago

There were real pushes from the early 70s on to combat pollution from many sources. One thing that many Americans will remember from then (or from seeing it later) is the "Crying Indian" ad from 1971. Pollution also made it into songs about little things like the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire that provided a lot of push for the passage of the Clean Water Act not long after.

alaxsxaq 5y ago
America solved a large part of air and water pollution issues as a side-effect of policies which shifted production largely off-shore. That solution won't work for the remainder. The trash problem seems to have worsened - especially in the cities. Municipal governments have eliminated street cleaning from their service portfolio and now seem to mostly rely on things getting so bad that some civil group sign on to their adopt-a-highway program and make some effort to clean things up once or twice a year. Hard to take care of the home when you're busy sending trillions to destroying people's lives in other parts of the world. The difficulty I have in looking optimistically toward the future comes from my lack of confidence in the leadership of this nation. An entrenched two-party system and a complicit media has led us to a place where we cannot adequately provide for basic human needs (education, health, and housing). Without caring for those things for all of the people living within our borders, the hard choices we will need to make are going to bring us through a period of turmoil as the pains of adjustment are felt unevenly throughout our society. Someone is going to lose and it probably won't be the rich and upper middle class. We will likely end up covering them for the loss of their beach-side property while the poor sod living in the countryside will be treated like we currently treat our homeless.

extra88 5y ago

If they were littering like that in the early 80s, their community was very much lagging behind the American culture overall. Or maybe it was just the people they were around literally being trashy. It wasn't, and isn't today, an American thing. Plenty of countries had, and even still do have, casual attitudes about littering.

GaryTang 5y ago

Visit India or South America, 10x worse now than the US was in the 80s.