Butt out

Red light. I pull up next to a new black BMW. As its tinted window lowers, the driver casually flits out her cigarette butt onto the road. The window powers up. Green light. And she's gone.

How many times have you seen a smoker, out for a quick puff, discard his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk? All it takes is a walk down any street and you'll see hundreds of butts littering the landscape. It surprises me, that in this current climate of environmental awareness, this practice is allowed to continue... unchallenged.

I thought initially that it was just one of those downtown, badass, city things, but as I started to observe this closer, I saw this custom happening everywhere, spanning the divides of age, geography and socioeconomic status.

I remember, back in the day, being out for a Sunday afternoon drive with the family in our 8 cylinder boat of a car. I would be sitting in the backseat, without a seatbelt, watching as my dad would pull over to the side of a country road and dump his ashtray. He liked a clean car. As politically incorrect as many of these activities would be today, the ashtray dump is still happening. It may be one butt at a time but it's a numbers thing.

Now, I'm not saying that all smokers do this. And I'm not trying to pick on smokers. Some of the coolest people I know smoke... lots of different things. Who I am to deny someone the gratification that smoking brings? Maybe this is just the fallout of having exiled smokers from our buildings and restaurants and onto the street. Either way, it's our issue.

Does anyone care about this or do I just need to butt out?