Lost Butts

This happens more often than it absolutely should.  You’re driving…stop-start driving, on a highway with lots of traffic lights, and there’s people you recognize as you agonizingly creeping down the highway.  The man/woman next to you has the window open, and you notice that they’re smoking.  Truth be told, you knew someone was smoking, because if your car is like mine, and you don’t have the setting on your AC/Heat set to recycle the air in the cabin, then you’ve been smelling cigarette smoke for about 3 lights now.

So, there’s this dude/dudette, and they’re smoking, and just as they finish their last draw, they then flick that butt onto the street.

Can you help me answer this question: where the hell do they think that butt goes?  I’d like to believe that it’s not just wanton apathy towards littering.  Because 9 times out of 10, that’s what it is.  Instead, I’d prefer that their  limited intellect suggests to them that if they populate highways/streetscapes/mall parking lots with cigarette butts, that they’re doing some kind of benevolent service to the community.  For instance, one of the following perhaps:

Cigarette smokers firmly believe that they are actively padding freeways and streets to reduce damage caused by severe collisions on those roads.  The amount of paper and tobacco residue is sufficient enough to “soften the blow” of the crash enough to save lives.  Thank god they’re throwing their butt out the window because, if they didn’t, there would be far more deaths and injury due to auto collisions.

Cigarette smokers are fairly ignorant of how a cigarette is made.  Yes, it’s delicious at 8am after a good night’s sleep.  Takes the edge off of…well…sleep, which is just nerve wracking.  No, smokers firmly believe that there are seed properties in the butt of the cigarette, and that by tossing them out the window, they are somehow attempting to re-plant new cigarette trees for everybody to enjoy!  What a service they are providing.  It’s the damn government’s street-sweepers that are the problem, keeping those seeds from germinating and reducing cigarette spending by killing the “crop” before it’s manifested!

Cigarette smokers live by their own rules.  You know those kids from high school…the rebels: the ones who smoked.  God we wanted to be like them.  And their reward for being such trend-setters in life is the ability to litter wherever they’d like.  Hell, it’s their right.  They’ve earned it.  I mean, without them, 1980’s black leather jackets with long tassels would have been considered tacky instead of righteous!  Where would rock and roll be without the cigarette?  Music?  Late nights in the art studio?  These people, these blessed cigarette smokers, have built our culture from the ground up, so cut them a little slack if they feel like rolling down the window and throwing a potentially live flame into the street.  Let me ask you this: what have you done to repay them?  Exactly.

That all said, I find it really crappy that people just don’t think about what they’re going to do with that butt when they’re done.  It would be great if we could call them out on it as it happens.  Help me?  We don’t really need to stand for it anymore because it’s flat out wrong and stupid.  Please help me help them think for once.   Not sure we’ll have an impact because they are obviously of limited intelligence, but we can try.  All hands in: go team!