Hey people: pick up your trash. What is so hard about picking up after yourselves? I could not believe the mess people left at a gate area at LAX prior to my recent flight.
Slobs At LAX Use Gate Area As Trash Can
I was at LAX last week and working on my laptop at the gate. Boarding commenced and usually I’d be among the first to board, but I finished my note before stepping onboard and by the time I put my laptop, I was one of a few people left in the gate area.
I looked around and could not believe what I saw: it looked like a baseball stadium after a game. Trash everywhere. One the chairs, on the floors…and there was even a trash can nearby.
While I wasn’t paying close attention to who was sitting around me, they weren’t loud or swearing (unlike at my gate at JFK when coming home, but that’s another story…).
But as you can see by the images, this wasn’t the work of one person.
And so it got me thinking. Do people think because they are at an airport that employees janitors to keep it clean, they can just dump trash on the ground or leave it in chairs?
I hope that is not the case. If that is you: clean up after yourself. There’s no excuse for leaving trash onboard. And while we’re on the subject, same rule applies to airplanes. The seatback pocket or floor under your seat is not your rubbish bin.
When the flight attendants come around with trash bags, put your trash inside it. Don’t be a slob.
CONCLUSION
Good stewardship of the environment starts on a personal level. Treating others the way you want to be treated starts on a personal level. Doing the right thing starts on a personal level. My message is simple: pick up your trash.
Epilogue: I picked up the trashed and threw it away. Don’t congratulate me, just pick up your own trash.
Ehhhhh looks almost like downtown Seattle or Portland or San Francisco or LA……same type of people.
The entitlement culture extends to not bothering to clean up after yourself.
You’re right Chris…there’s white trash everywhere.
What Chris is trying to say, all stealth like, is that he thinks only liberals and/or people of color are this dirty.
Just search for California exodus. Never so many people are leaving your state like now.
@CHRIS: +1. People do what they are used to do. They live surrounded by trash so they think this is normal.
@Santastico +1.
Poor people, who unfortunately tend to be POC in our society, are less likely to fly. Instead, it’s my fellow white people who are leaving their trash around because they’re used to having people clean up after them as Matthew clearly illustrates that in his pictures. I wish my fellow anglos were not so trashy but education can hopefully help them overcome their sense of superiority and lack of personal responsibility.
Lots of assumptions here about race, you all look dumb. Maybe you can all just agree that people in the LAX area in general are trashy
Sadly, I’m seeing as much trash in these comments as was left in the gate area.
@Christian: where did I say this was caused by poor people? What I said is that populations from cities like LA and SF are used to be surrounded by trash in their own downtown so they might think that is normal so they surrounded themselves with trash when at an airport. Have you visited downtown SF lately? That is an open dump.
This is a problem at airport, on the airplane (ever seen some people’s seating area?), and hotel rooms (I’ve seen maids open a door to a messy room and have seen rooms with the curtains open when there’s an exterior entrance to the room).
In contrast, my seating area on the plane is always neat, on occasion, I even put back the seat belts nicely. I even often sort of make the bed…one pull of the blanket so that it covers the bed sort of evenly but not neatly made. However, I must admit that I often take the unopened roll of toilet paper — one roll per trip maximum unless the luggage is full.
I miss airport slobs.
You all have been ignoring the root cause of the trash problem. Any native Californian will tell you that California for over 50 years has been the dumping ground for trash from other states and countries. From Charles Manson (born Ohio) to Nancy Pelosi (born Maryland) the trash just blows in nonstop.
Guess it is all the righteous people traveling in the middle of a so called PANDEMIC!
@Santastico – I agree with you that it wasn’t caused by poor people. It’s not like migrant laborers suddenly decide to jet off to Hawaii for some R&R. These are people who are used to having poor people clean up after them. The people leaving the garbage in the airport are the trash. They are less likely to be POC for the stated reasons but people as trash are not limited to any specific ethnicity.
I tried to ask the native Tongva people what they thought of Nancy Pelosi but they were all exterminated by the Spanish in the 1800s.
I’m sorry @Jan, but you’re the one who sounds dumb. You’re indicting LAX and Angelenos based on their behavior at an airport. An AIRPORT!!! And being an airport it means that people who may or may not be Angelenos are in that airport. They may be headed back to whatever cage they call home. They may in fact dwell from the same hell hole town that you grew up in. And as someone who spends a lot of time in airports, I know for a fact that LAX is just another trash depot for thoughtless, inconsiderate clowns from anywhere in this country and world.
burritomiles is not quite correct – some of the Tonva (Gabrielinos) survived into the 1900s, but like the Chumash in my home county of Santa Barbara, the last of the tribal DNA was in mixed race descendants. The Chumash still exist as an identified people, but after the 1950s the Tonva-Gabrielinos no longer existed as an identified people. I can’t blame Pelosi for what happened with the Tonva, but as an Italian-American I can vouch that Nancy certainly deserves The Italian Salute for helping San Francisco go downhill.
I see a lot of general confirmation bias going on here. I’m going to pile onto it. 🙂
I read a study that claimed that diverse societies tended to be more anti-social. This isn’t just race, but also transient population. Think classic NYC. People from different regions and cultures in a highly competitive dog-eat-dog environment become anti-social and selfish. Google the “Universe 25 experiment.”
It’s possible that only a small minority of people left around all the trash but that triggers bad behavior from a cascade of observers who see a “taboo” broken and then engage in it themselves. When people are trained to clean up after themselves, and they share this culture with people they recognize (could be a dialect, for example), they’ll either socially enforce good manners or share in bad traditions. Bad manners can be a tradition after a while just like good traditions.
Sometimes there’s stories behind trash. For example: If you’re in a crowded environment waiting at a gate and there’s a zillion people around you and you have 4 kids you’re watching and information overload and you hear your boarding group called, you rush to the gate. You’re worried about getting your kids into the gate, with all their stuff, and your ID’s and boarding pass ready. You leave the trash there because have you ever tried to put trash away while watching after 4 kids not jumping off? I’m not excusing that behavior, but I am explaining it.
It’s a shame that some travelers at LAX don’t just pick their stuff up. I wish they were more tidy. Unfortunately I don’t think this is a problem that is unique to the Southland.
You live in this country and that surprise you?
I’ve lived or travelled to plenty of super diverse societies with very high degrees of social capital and where I would not expect this level of slovenliness: Canada, Singapore, Australia come to mind, but even in London, which isn’t exactly a pristine clean city would I expect this sort of littering. I’ve also lived in the U.S. and I see a lot more trash on the streets there. I had never experienced someone literally throwing trash out their car window on the freeway until I came to the U.S.. My own experience suggests this is a U.S. thing, not a diversity thing. Just my personal experience YMMV.
@Jan, the government assistance you are on, is paid by the Californians like us. You’re very welcome. We are glad that you and your kids won’t go to bed hungry tonight.
Filthy creatures. They should be ordered to do community service cleaning public restrooms, including those in airports.
Working those LAX-MIA legs, the plane looks like it had an explosive decompression. If you sell tickets for $50 then that’s what you get. I just loathe those parents that feed crackers to the kids who mash them into the flooring for fun. The greasy chicken eaters and the afro sheen al over the windows and seat head rests.
I’m just here to see conservatives make complete fools of themselves yet again by interjecting their own irrelevant opinions about politics, class, or race. Thanks for the laugh!
@Santastico – Actually that’s fake news. California is a large state, and there are often a lot of people who leave and move there. The San Francisco Bay area has experienced a small population loss, but many of those people are moving south to Los Angeles & San Diego. And the reason they are leaving is the high cost of housing, and ability to work remotely. And in a capitalist economy high housing costs mean high demand. So your insinuation that people are leaving California because they don’t like it, is blatantly false.
And many of the people who have left California for Texas or Arizona (for example), are returning, due to high hidden taxes, awful weather, and poor infrastructure. They now realize that the high cost of living in California is well worth it, compared to the hidden costs & expenses and just horrible standard of living experienced in Texas & Arizona.
Your ignorance, and pettiness only makes you look smaller than I am sure you are.
@LA7260 you’re too generous but I’m ok. Maybe you should stop looking after me though and have your city and state invest in more tents and porta-potties so your homeless bums don’t defecate all over your streets.
What do you expect from a city that prides itself in its “diversity”? How ethnocentric of you to judge another culture who leaves trash all over the place…