Like any sensible person, I picked up the bag, walked down the hallways of Bloomberg Hall with my arms fully extended, breathing through my mouth, until I reached the garbage drop.
I made a mess. I cleaned it up.
For reasons I cannot quite understand, that same process is forgotten in Frist Campus Center, shared bathrooms and public kitchens.
Some of my favorite campus spaces regularly get trashed. I watched a strange event unfold on Halloween when an inebriated pimp drunkenly threw a plate on floor in Frist. Angry, a menacing Joker confronted the polluter. In a heated stare-off, the pimp refused to pick up his plate and slurred, "Isss not my job to clean it up!"
It was heartening to see someone vocally defend a community standard. Equally disheartening was seeing a young adult so arrogant he assumed the rules did not apply to him.
It seems only fair that, as residents, we take care of the space we have been provided. If students assume that their actions occur in a vacuum void of consequence, they ignore all the people who work to maintain our campus.
If some of us lack the common courtesy to pick up our trash, they broadcast a message of naked selfishness and laziness. The paper plates and plastic cups littered around campus tell the janitors that we do not extend to them the same basic politeness we extend to other members of the campus community.
Excluding service workers from the Princeton community creates a chilling effect in which advantaged students literally lay waste to their surroundings with the knowledge that "someone else" will clean up their mess.
The callous selfishness extends to roommates. I have heard horror stories of roommates vomiting in a shared bathroom and refusing to clean up the mess because it was "gross." In an act of defiance, the other roommates refused to clean up the bathroom. Instead of learning the lesson, the indignant puker started using a different bathroom down the hall.
The nightmare roommate can inconvenience or disrupt the schedule of others or possibly cause a health problem. Occasional outliers who refuse to comply to basic community standards can ruin a community.
The obvious contempt for common decency and disdain for community standards is repeated weekly by students who neglect and abuse public space. While cooking in a kitchen over Fall Break, I found it filled with dirty dishes taken from dining halls.
I am sure that people who left their dishes in the kitchen never thought that I would have to clean them or that I would end up writing a mean column about them. But that facile thinking is what I have the greatest problem with. Quickly assuming that the problems you create will be solved by someone else is immature.
As students at a prestigious academic institution, we often exhibit stunning self-control and intellectual rigor. During midterms and finals, libraries and study spaces are jam-packed with hundreds of students exercising extreme personal responsibility. The care taken to make Princeton a thriving academic institution should be applied equally to thoughtfully taking care of public space.
Making the campus a cleaner, healthier and generally more livable space does not require a massive effort. All that's required is thinking about the people around you and whether they want to live with your vomit, trash or dirty dishes. And for those who are not that thoughtful, a good dose of peer pressure and shaming should help.
It is true: Someone else will probably clean up your mess. But your relying on the good graces of others will exhaust everyone else. I am sure that many will find this advice very obvious, but that people ignore basic rules of decency in their 20s is reason enough that it bears repeating.
As for me, I plan on taking out the trash before I leave on winter break, or at least buying some Febreze.
Michael Collins is a sophomore from Glastonbury, Conn. He can be reached at mjlcollin@princeton.edu.
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