The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Civic Pride
THEY were having their weekly clean up at one of the rooming houses on John Street a few days ago, and as I walked by I saw one of the fellows raise a window and empty a waste paper basket out into the air. The wind caught the contents, and Sunday supplements and first drafts of themes, and scratch paper, and excelsior went whirling off to land in a score of door yards and to litter up a dozen fence corners.
I have no doubt but that many a man who uses his neighbor's back yard as a dumping ground could write, perhaps has already written, a stirring paper on the beautifying of our cities, but he still continues to throw his cigarette stubs and his Hershey chocolate wrappers, and his empty pop corn bags into the street or to drop his newspaper wherever he happens to have tired of it; it is not his business, he affirms, to keep the streets clean.
I am sure that many of our citizens would find it a profitable investment to buy a paper baler, and to gather up and sell the waste paper that blows across their premises from the careless hands of those whose civic pride has never been adequately stimulated.
It takes more than a clean-up day or a superintendent of streets to make a clean or a beautiful city. It takes the constant co-operation of every man and woman and of every school child. If we would all keep our walks clean and our yards neat, if we would gather up the paper and the trash that we see lying or blowing about, rather than help to scatter it, we would soon see a material improvement in the appearance of these two towns. If there is any community which should present an ideal appearance, it is a colllege town. We are studying sanitation and sociology and economics and ethics but for too many it is mere theory and not practice. One needs no more than half an Civie Pride eye when walking down Green or Wright streets in Champaign or Illinois street in Urbana to observe what an untidy, slatternly appearance we make, and all because the individual citizen has mot developed any civic pride.
April