The Little Piggies of Fannin County

My View by Jim Yacavone

(July 17, 2016)

Most of us are familiar with the game that mothers play with the toes of their infants. It starts out, “this little piggy went to the market” and ends “this little piggy went wee, wee, wee all the way home.” Based upon the amount of trash I see alongside our roads it appears that too many of those little piggies grew up and reside in Fannin County. 

Sad to say, but our roadsides are littered with the ugly detritus of civilization—garbage bags, fast food wrappers, beer cans, white foam cups, plastic bottles, cigarette butts, scraps of paper. Every now and then the county or some civic-minded group comes along and cleans up a section of road but within a few days the trash is back. The net result is an ugly visual blight on our area.

We are blessed to live in one of the more beautiful areas of the country. People come here to enjoy the natural beauty of our woods, mountains, creeks, rivers and lakes. And yet a certain segment of the population insists on treating our roadsides like a giant trash can. What sort of mouth breathing moron can look at our scenic vistas and think, “Okay, this is a good place to throw out my McDonalds’ bag?” Oh, maybe I’ve answered my own question.

I’d like to believe the culprits are visitors to Fannin County but I fear that most of the trash comes from homegrown trash terrorists. My reasoning is that visitors come here to enjoy the scenery and are less likely to trash it up than longtime locals who have become indifferent to the natural beauty around them and don’t give a second thought to tossing their rubbish by the wayside. I could be wrong.

Regardless, it’s a crying shame that the rest of us must be the unwilling victims of the litter piggies.

Under the Georgia law littering is a misdemeanor. The maximum penalty is a fine up to $1,000 and imprisonment up to one year. Interestingly, the law says that convicted violators can be required to pick up litter over a distance not to exceed one mile, and their names can be published to shame them. If it were me, I’d quintuple the distance to five miles, make convicted violators use tweezers to pick up the trash, force them to wear a big scarlet letter “T” and put their names on billboards.

I wish there was some effective way to address the problem but I’m afraid there isn’t. It’s too much to expect our law enforcement to spend time trying to catch litterers. They have more serious crimes to attend to.

I thought about using something like the red light cameras that are used elsewhere to catch people who run red lights but given the many miles of roads in Fannin County that’s simply not practical. I’ve thought about deputizing concerned citizens and giving them cameras to catch litter piggies in the act but that wouldn’t work for many reasons. It’s probably illegal, it could be dangerous, and I suspect that it would take far too many hours of watching and waiting to nab even one litterer.

Some suggest that an anti-littering campaign would be effective but I have my doubts. If you’re so ignorant and uncaring to throw trash out your car window you probably have no shame to begin with and will never know better.

So in the end our litter blight is a problem without an adequate solution. And that’s too bad.

That’s my view. What’s yours?