Does anyone remember a series of PSA’s that were run in the 70’s to combat litter? They featured Native American actor, Iron Eyes Cody, and showed him surveying fields, streams, and highways littered with debris. At the end of the ad there was a closeup of a tear streaming down Cody’s face. And has anyone noticed the increase in TV, radio and billboards PSA’s across the state of Tennessee battling the same litter problem? The campaign, Stop Litter, Tennessee’s Had Enough, features ordinary citizen’s talking about the litter problem here.

I got the message in the 70’s from both the TV ads and my parents, who told us to keep our trash with us until we found a proper receptacle. When I moved here almost 16 years ago I was amazed at the amount of people in Tennessee who either never got the message or choose to ignore it. People who look like exactly like Steve Gill.

That’s why I find it extraordinarily offensive that Gill has found yet another dimension in his one-man quest to divide us and demonize an entire race of people by railing against the “three car loads of Mexicans or Latinos or whatever” he saw throwing trash out their car windows this weekend.

His reference is a photo essay appearing on chron.com stating that litter is “choking streets throughout Mexico” and “Garbage thrown into the streets is a common problem in Mexico City and the rest of the country — even in the capital city’s upscale neighborhood of Condesa.” “It’s their culture,” Gill says and, in what can only be described as a simplistic reduction of a complex issue, “this is what happens when you bring a third world culture into a first world country.”

What he leaves out is that in addition to a lack of education and concern about the issue in Mexico, there are only several dozen of Mexico’s more than 2,500 cities, towns and villages that any kind of municipal garbage dump” and, according to Jorge Trevino, director of ECOCE (Ecología y Compromiso Empresarial), an industry-funded group that manages recycling and public awareness campaigns, “There is a lack of infrastructure. In many cities, there is a lack of planning. There is nowhere to put the trash.”

Littering is not a new problem. Littering was not brought here by immigrants. Fortunately, in this country we not only have the infrastructure to dispose of trash properly but we have leaders and organizations that for decades have tried to educate us about the issue.

So, Mr. Gill and people that look like him who I see littering every day, what’s your excuse?

This post was written by Mary Mancini