More Garbage

I posted on this once before, but nobody listened....or nobody read my pontification of the subject as this was back in April, before attaining my current massive following.

From the Arizona Daily Star
Crossers burying border in garbage
Despite cleanups, trash along smuggling routes piles up faster than ever
By Tony Davis

After three years of cleanups, the federal government has achieved no better than a 1 percent solution for the problem of trash left in Southern Arizona by illegal border-crossers.
Cleanup crews from various agencies, volunteer groups and the Tohono O'odham Nation hauled about 250,000 pounds of trash from thousands of acres of federal, state and private land across Southern Arizona in 2002 to 2005, says the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
But that's only a fraction of the nearly 25 million pounds of trash thought to be out there.

Go read the whole article, I'll wait for you to get back....

...You're back. good

Now do you remember that part at the beginning, nearly 25 million pounds of trash thought to be out there., that's 12 thousand 500 tons (12,500) of crap being left for us to pick up. The government needs to budget $62.9 million over five years to try to clean this up, and this number I'm sure is calculated only to deal with what they think is out there now. Without doing something about the border, it's just going to get worse and cost more.

Some have said that if they weren't forced to go through the desert to illegally enter the country, this would'nt be a problem. Well, I can tell you their habit of dumping trash wherever convenient does not stop once they hit cities. I lived and worked in the Barrio for over 20 years, my company had property scattered all through the Temple-Beaudry district of L.A. We had to have an extra dumpster just to clean up the couches, TV's, dressers, etc. That would just be dumped on our property.

L.A. Public Works has a program for heavy hauling, If it's to big to go in the trash can, call a number and they'll pick it up on trash day, no charge. They advertise it constantly in every language you could possibly run into, but the only parts of the city that won't use it seems to be the barrio sections. I've never seen the dumping in Little Japan, Koreatown, Little Armenia or Chinatown (except the sections where the Chinese are moving out).

In my younger days, I was a avid hiker and camper. I live right below the Angeles National Forest and a day trip to a waterfall with a pool was a weekly jaunt and weekend camping overnight at 10,000 feet elevation to get out of the heat and smog was monthly. I was raised with the rule "Pack it in-Pack it out+", you tried to pick up a little more and leave the mountains better than when you went in. I stopped going about 10 years ago when my son was 8 and I was trying to introduce him to hiking, broken glass in the pools, soiled diapers (oh G-d), Styrofoam containers, old couches left at campsites. Where the trip was suppose to relieve the tensions of the city, I was finding myself more depressed that the mountains had been defiled.

I know that not every piece of crap left in the mountains is not left by illegals, but from my experience, if i called others on leaving trash, 90% of the time they would pick it up. When I called the hispanics on it, nicely, as in "Hey, you forgot to take pack your trash out", i've been threatened more times than not.

I know I have wandered far afield on this, but I have been to Mexico and see the respect and/or training of there creeping across the border. I do not want to have the norm to be the trashing of a beautiful country.