It is a shame there isn’t space enough to print every one of the grade school entries in our Brain-Drain contest for neighborhood improvement ideas. You would have to be touched by the frequency with which the youngsters wrote about a clean, pretty, friendly neighborhood. “If only everybody picked up their trash”, “I’d fix it so there would be trash cans everyplace and everybody would clean up so there wouldn’t be litter and dirt” — “I’d wave a Shape-Up wand so everybody would Shape-Up” — “I’d like to have everybody be friendly to everybody,” — “I’d get it so everybody knew everybody” — “There ought to be no fighting”.
This is one thing we can supply the youngsters with no master plan, no federal grant, no appeals to the city. All it takes is enough energy to bend over and pick up any litter we see, any place we see it. That’s not much energy.
It takes even less energy to smile and say “Hi” when we pass young people on the street. Their mothers have no doubt told them not to talk to strangers, but a smile and a “hi” in passing should do no harm.
Whether we own a home, rent a home or run a business in the neighborhood, we can have a clean, pretty neighborhood by using our eyes and a wastebasket. We can smile a greeting to each other and that would make the neighborhood a beauty spot on the gloomiest, cloudiest day.
So let’s start smiling today! And start looking around our yards, streets, sidewalks and alleys and hide all the litter so when the youngsters wake up tomorrow they’ll have their clean, friendly place to live.
Originally published in The Paper, April 1971.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1971_04.pdf, printed page 6.
