With Community Cleanup Month in the City of Thompson having launched yesterday, we can expect to see people and organizations out and about over the next 30 days, picking up the abundant trash that litters the landscape, either out of a sense of community pride, or just because it’s a relatively simple way to raise some money for a community group, to buy a treat for yourself, or possibly even for beer. Whatever their motivations, in addition to the $3 per bag of garbage that they will receive if they register with the public works department, these people deserve our appreciation for taking time that they could be spending doing something less gross and instead correcting a problem that they almost certainly play no part in creating.
Thompson has a litter problem. It also has an irresponsibility problem, a pride problem, and an entitlement problem that results in some residents and some visitors feeling like their actions don’t have consequences or not caring what those consequences are because they feel no attachment to this place, like they have no stake in making it any better and that, perhaps, in the long run, none of it really matters.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The impression that garbage lying on city streets and in parks and caught in trees gives to visitors and also to residents is that Thompson is trashy. It has many other positive qualities besides, and more than a few other negative ones as well, as does every other community, but first impressions matter. And in at least some parts of the city, the impression Thompson gives off is of an overgrown work camp, one that many people are just passing through for the sake of money and to which they will never return again and therefore don’t really give a crap about.
This is not a new problem. For much of its history, this is what Thompson was – a mining community with a highly transient population that would grow when times were good and ship out to greener pastures when they were bad. Facilities and buildings were constructed on the cheap, with most people figuring that by now, the community would have ceased to exist or fizzled to a shrunken rump of a town, well below the peak population levels of 15,000 to 20,000 people. Only it hasn’t. It’s still here. It’s not growing and is definitely going through a transitional period in which a lot of the longtime residents and businesses that gave the city its character are closing down, packing up and heading out.
As praiseworthy as the efforts of any person in Thompson who picks up a bag of trash or even just collects some broken bits of glass on a playground and puts them in the garbage can are, those efforts are not going to solve the litter problem, no matter how often they occur or how long they continue for. Those people already understand what it means to be citizens, to take responsibility, to do what their parents told them when they were growing up and left their toys and clothes lying around the house for someone else to pick up. None of us like having to pay to take things to the dump, to pay extra fees for sofas and mattresses and refrigerators but we do it because we feel an obligation to obey the rules that help society function as well as it does (though how well that is can be debated). A similar editorial will probably have to be written next year because the litter situation will probably not be any better by then, or by the year after that, or the year after that. Thompson may indeed be gone by the time the problem of people not treating their environment with respect is resolved, whether because of an epiphany or because there just aren’t people around anymore. To everybody who alleviates the result of other people’s carelessness and recklessness by participating in Community Cleanup Month, thanks. And thanks to those who don’t contribute to the problem in the first place by putting their garbage where it’s supposed to go and sucking it up and paying the dump fees. The people who make Thompson give off a trashy first impression don’t deserve any thanks, expect maybe from the ravens.
