Melted pink ice cream oozing out of its brown waffle cone and running its way down the stairs was the last thing I expected to see on the front stairwell of Campion Hall. Clearly visible to anyone walking up or down the steps, a majority of the residents must have carefully and deliberately avoided the mess. How could anyone desecrate my old home like this? I grabbed some paper towels, hunched over and began scooping and wiping up the ice cream, then dumped it in the trash. And then something inside me changed: Why stop at just one ice cream cone? I spent the rest of the night cleaning up the building to the raised brows of the residents.
What justifies leaving your garbage on the ground? Sure, the custodians normally clean it up, but why should they have to? Because they are getting paid to do it?
Leaving your trash for others to pick up because it is their job is incredibly disrespectful. It’s the same thing as walking into class and being assigned a 10-page paper due the next day.
It’s so easy to bend over and pick up the paper towel that you just dropped on the floor when you missed the shot trying to get it into the garbage. It takes less than two minutes to bring your cardboard box out to the dumpster and come back. There is no reason to save a measly amount of time doing the right thing so that you can spend those extra seconds staring at a wall. You can make up this time and so much more if you learned how not to procrastinate. The time spent cleaning up after yourself in these cases is completely negligible.
People have no problem cleaning up their own spaces. But take just one step out the door, and people feel free to leave ice cream, garbage and cardboard boxes for someone else to clean up. Why does just one step make a difference between keeping your room tidy and suddenly not caring about what gets left on the ground?
There is no excuse, no reason for leaving any of this garbage for somebody else to clean, other than one’s own laziness and privilege. Nobody is so limited on time that they can’t bend over and pick up the paper towel they just dropped, or care enough to clean up a mess they made or make one trip out to the dumpster to drop off a cardboard box.
Yes, it is true that you can continue leaving your trash out in the common areas and the custodians will keep cleaning it up. They will certainly not appreciate your contributions to their workload. Stop leaving this garbage out for others to pick up. It is damaging to the community and it is incredibly disrespectful.
After my 45-minute cleaning crusade in Campion, I realized I should not stop there. With some thought and a quick understanding that there was absolutely no justification for stopping at just one building, I did the same for Regis and Jogues, this time returning any ripped down door tags to the Resident Assistant doors and collecting loose posters that fell.
Most people would ask me why I spent two hours that night cleaning the residence halls. Put simply, the reasons to do it outweighed the reasons not to. My time could have been spent sleeping or goofing off. Why not use my time more wisely and give back to the community? Community service doesn’t need to be scheduled. You shouldn’t feel like you need to receive credit for it and you shouldn’t do it just to throw it on a resume to balance you into looking like a good person. Community service is as easy as looking at the ground and realizing that nobody is going to clean this ice cream until the morning, but it would be nice if it just disappeared right now. Take that idea, and multiply it by each incident per building. It makes a huge difference. As a final note, you would be surprised to hear exactly how many toilets are left unflushed on a given night between three residence halls.
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