Before the launch of this season of Mad Men, AMC ran a teaser of the show’s most shocking moments to date. There was the early episode where we found out Don wasn’t Don, and Peggy discovering she’s pregnant — when she has a baby — and the time Roger Sterling vomited on the floor in front of the Nixon people. But the most shocking moment for me came in the second season, when after a picnic beside what looked like the Taconic Parkway, Don and his nuclear family stood up to leave — but not before throwing their trash all over the pristine lawn on which they’d been noshing. Don even took aim with a beer can, pitching it high into the trees. 

If you grew up in the sixties, littering was tantamount to killing kittens. Of course we knew people who did both (I remember my father drowning a few of the latter) but starting about the time the organization Keep America Beautiful joined forces with the Ad Council in 1961, we were indoctrinated with slogans such as “Every litter bit hurts!” Remember the Litter Bug? Okay, well he remembers you and he’s lurking there, in your subconscious, right beside Smokey the Bear and the Jolly Green Giant. 

The organization has been criticized over the years, mostly for serving as a shill for the very industries who produce all the non-recyclable waste in the first place and especially for the Crying Indian ad campaignof the seventies,  featuring Iron Eyes Cody. But even if events like the Great American Cleanup aren’t on your calendar, they helped make America aware of litter, the way Germans are aware of the Holocaust. 

Some Americans, that is. Because if you live in an urban environment such as mine you are confronted by the daily reality that some people really don’t care where they throw their trash. And pointing out the folly of their ways is an invitation to ridicule, at best. And yes, I am speaking about young black people for the most part, at least in my part of Brooklyn. 

Is this a racist observation? You tell me. I suspect it has something to do with culture and maybe generational influence. I remember throwing stuff out the car window as a child, but I also remember being reprimanded for it by my mother — the way I was reprimanded for using the N word. I can only conclude that the kids who throw their potato chip bags and candy wrappers and half-eaten fried chicken on the street have not been told not to do that — or have been and are practicing open rebellion amongst their friends. Maybe they’ll quit when they’re older, the way people quit smoking and sniffing glue. 

I guess I could do a control group study by hanging out at nearby Brooklyn Tech,which seems to be about 80% Chinese-American. It could just be that there is no one shared culture anymore. If you remember the Crying Indian or the Litter Bug it’s because there was nothing else on and you couldn’t skip through the commercials. What if there was a video of Jay-Z and Kanye West putting trash in its place?

Kids would probably throw garbage at it.