Here comes the broken record...

I was at Hughes park Tuesday. There were mounds of garbage, and people standing RIGHT NEXT to trash bins...tossing their trash on the grass.

I watched a woman who threw a soda can on the grass, less than 5 feet from the trash can. I pointed directly at the can, looked her in the eye, then pointed directly to the trash bin. She didn't put the two together.

I'm about to give up and say fuck this town. Seriously.

I feel like a nag, bitching about trash but it says a lot. It says so much about the people I'm choosing to raise my children around. Oliver and Charlie are going to go to school with the children of these people.

People can dismiss it all they want with platitudes about "if you raise em right", but it's bullshit. I understand I'm going to teach my children like my parents taught me. I understand that it's my responsibility to teach them what's right and what's wrong. The problem is, it's not like every litter bug just decided one day that "You know what, I'm just gonna litter from now on". It's not some lifestyle choice. It's learned behavior, with multiple levels of self-justification and indifference. It's established by osmosis, and if I raise my kids in Bakersfield...surrounded by trash, what the hell does it say?

"Here ya go kids. It's the best I could do."

Fuck that, and fuck Bakersfield leadership.

I mean, we don't have enough police officers to enforce anything, but we're building parks on the west side of town and water parks downtown? We're so obsessed with injecting "culture" into this city, but we're missing the point. Museums and parks can influence classier people to move here, but they won't change the people already here. Punishment for being trashy slobs can. Get some cops out there long enough to watch people litter, and make a big show of ticketing them stiff fines for doing it.

You could take a bustling park anywhere in the city, with a birthday party, a quinceanera, a soccer match and daily playground kids...and you can grind it to a halt with a few flashing lights and a simple ticket. Just a week-long crackdown. Make people see it is illegal and it is their problem.

Besides, right now I don't give a rats ass about a bunch of south side bakers and punk ass gangbanging wannabe's shooting at each other. I don't even care about their innocent neighbors at this point. Give em a week to do whatever damage they can, and put those cops on litter patrol.

Shit would change around here.

I seem to remember this city being so out of control with red light runners that everyone with half a brain was terrified to drive through any intersection, and especially a handful of really dangerous ones.

I ain't no fool, so I still look both ways twice, every time....but those red light cameras they installed changed things on some roads. You still see an idiot get a flash every once in a while, but for the most part the rice burning punks aren't slammin through California and Oak at 80mph on a Wednesday evening.

"This town needs an enema." - The Joker