Litterbugs and Dirty Houses

Three things happened this last week that all struck a chord. For better or worse, my mind drew a connection between these events. Let's see where this leads...

The first event happened on Saturday. The missus went shopping for pre-school clothes. No, not her pre-school - Vania's (our 4 year old). My wife went shopping with the van. The van has Vania's one and only car seat. I expected to visit the library and park, taking the girls with me in the van.

So there we are standing in an empty garage, Dad, Deanna, Lucy, and Vania. I spent the next hour distracting Vania - who expected to go to the park. Why? Because my wife is uncomfortable driving the car. She can drive it. She has driven it. She doesn't want to drive it.

The second event occurred at church. I was standing around outside. A girl and boy walked along the street. I watched the boy unwrap an ice cream cone. Without even missing a beat, the boy dropped the wrapper right in the grass. Never even looked back or down.

The third event happened on the way to work. I drove by a business owner walking by the highway picking up trash. People had hurled fast food bags, cups, and wrappers from their car onto his property. Bags and wrappers attract bugs. They look ugly.

These three things reminded me of the book Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box by the Abinger Institute. The book discusses how we view people as objects. In this state, we hold a fundamental disrespect of other people. Those three events display that fundamental disrespect.

Take the boy with the ice cream wrapper. He had a problem - how to get rid of the useless wrapper. Did the boy solve the problem? Well, no. He imposed his problem onto someone else. Now someone at the church will pick up the wrapper and they must find a way to dispose of it. See how the problem still remains - getting rid of the useless wrapper. Just the responsibility shifted.

The missus did the same thing. Driving the car presents an inconvenience. Taking the van imposed inconvenience on the rest of the family. It didn't overcome anything. It shifted the responsibility. That shifting - the imposition - shows a fundamental disrespect for the person on the receiving end.