Daily Verse | Numbers 36:7
No inheritance in Israel is to pass from tribe to tribe, for every Israelite shall keep the tribal land inherited from his forefathers.

Happy Tuesday. I regret that I missed my opportunity for a mid-life crisis.

A short and odd rant today.

I don’t have many pet peeves in this world, but there is one that irritates me: smokers who toss their cigarette butts on the ground.

I occasionally sit behind a car at an intersection and watch as the driver ejects a smoking butt from the vehicle like a spent shotgun shell. Sometimes the driver is more subtle, hugging the outside of the car door with his (or her) arm, holding the butt loosely between thumb and forefinger and letting it casually drop to the ground.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, it’s an entirely unreasonable practice. Ashtrays are available for every car. Smokers can tap the ashes of their cigarettes into the tray and, once done, they can crush the butt in the tray. They don’t have to throw their spent death stick out the window.

Yet they do. Why?

Perhaps it’s because smokers admit what non-smokers have claimed all along—that smoking is a dirty habit. Nobody, smokers included, likes the hassle of cleaning out their ashtray. It’s much easier to fling a cigarette’s remains onto the roadway than maintaining a clean ashtray.

But throwing it onto the roadway is littering. When a smoker tosses the stubble of his habit onto the pavement, I’m forced to inhabit an environment littered with his debris.

Not only are junked butts unsightly, they’re also dangerous. One time the driver of the car ahead of me tossed his glowing cigarette butt out the window. The butt hit the road and bounced up over the hood of my car, striking the windshield right in front of my face. The glass saved me, but what if I happened to be riding a motorcycle?

When I was a kid, some friends and I saw a woman drop her cigarette butt as she crossed the street near our grade school. We ran to pick it up and dared each other to take a drag, even though it had her lipstick on it. When a smoker drops their lit cigarette on the ground, it’s not a “done” deal. Who’s to say that a dropped, still-lit cigarette won’t burn a child or start a fire on dry grass or ignite automotive fuel?

Smokers who throw their cigarette butts on the ground simply reflect an uncaring attitude. They don’t care about themselves and they don’t care about others. As the Surgeon General’s warnings get larger and more blunt in print media, as tobacco companies admit the health threat their product poses, people ignore the facts and continue to smoke. With so little regard for themselves, is it any wonder that they don’t care for those around them?

Throwing a cigarette butt out the window is the smoker’s way of telling the world to shove off and keeping themselves free from the humiliation of emptying their own ashtray.

I’m glad I got that off my chest.

[Photo by Joshua Rondeau on Unsplash]