“Bless Thy Hood”

My whole life, I grew up in a neighborhood where it was cool to throw your trash on the ground, where there was no one telling us to respect the area we called home. In a city where the budget in certain sections is forgotten and citizens are left to fend for themselves, the downtown area is remains clean. It’s hard to even find a candy wrapper on the sidewalk. To put it simply: my city is not helping the litter problem in my section, and I get it. The people that are making the issue are people like me, who’d rather throw something out of the window instead of waiting until they can throw it into a trash can - but we are humans, and we mimic our environment.

But, we, at I Love Thy Hood, have found a simple solution that will solve a big problem, and this was all discovered when a neighbor of mine put one trash can on a block that didn’t have one on it already. He wrote “street trash” on it. One day, I saw this can empty, and the next day, half full. By the end of the week, trash was piled to the brim!! It was then that I realized why the trash can was there. 

We mimic what what we see. If I walked by that block and saw a pile of trash and I just finished a soda, guess what I would probably do... but if I see a can full of trash, 99% of the time I will throw that same bottle in the can. If that can was not there, most likely, all those bottles and fast food bags would have been laying in the street, in yards, in playgrounds, in the sewers. The messed up part is: that’s what the next block looks like, simply because there’s no trash can.... We have the power to change that. 

A 44-gallon trash can costs $50. Because of commercial businesses, fast food eateries, foot traffic, and commuters in the community, we have to do our best to stop pollution in the inner city. We love our city. So let’s act like it. A simple $1 can go a long way. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to our hood. Thank you for listening and thank you for your donations! God bless you!

Signed,

Matthew George