J.P. Morris was a thinker.
And when he spoke, he didn’t waste words. I relished every visit with him.
When I was involved in the ownership of The Baxley News-Banner, I could expect calls from the Appling County land baron and entrepreneur. He never tried to influence what was in the newspaper. He just wanted me to get to know him, and vice versa. We bonded.
J.P. Morris didn’t waste money, either. He was a savvy investor who did his homework. If he was considering investing in a community, his research included a visit to the local landfill.
He explained, “Before I invested in the community, I wanted to see what the residents threw away. That always told me something about the people. And it helped me to decide if I wanted to put my money to work there.”
Saturday morning, my late friend was on my mind. I wasn’t researching at the county dump. I was scouring the ditch that runs along the road in front of our farm, picking up litter—all 361 items.
Yep, I counted every piece.
But allow me to step out of the ditch for a moment.
How much attention do you pay to polls?
And has a pollster ever called you to ask your opinion or for whom you plan to vote?
Here’s how many times I’ve been polled.
Zero.
Since President Donald Trump returned to the White
House, the pollsters have been in overdrive.
What do you think about Elon Musk and his DOGE efforts? What do you
think about the deportation policy? What’s your opinion on tariffs—pro or con?
What’s the president’s overall approval rating?
From the headlines, you know the list.
How scientific and/or trustworthy are the numbers?
To be candid about the findings of my Saturday trash-in-the-ditch poll, absolutely nothing is scientific. What I am about to report is pure speculation, certified by 100 percent opinion.
After a rubber-gloved handling and review, these are samples of my findings:
§ A majority of people have read the hydration memo. Folks are sucking down gazillion bottles of water. But they ignored the fine print about recycling. The most common items found in the weeds were plastic water bottles.
§ Energy drinks are huge. Cans packed with sugar and caffeine are flying off shelves and out the windows. Austrian Dietrich Mateschitz, who founded Red Bull, was probably a billionaire when he died. But the 4-to-1 favorite of those get-you-wide-awake drinks tossed on the roadside was Monster cans.
§ Nicotine stimulation is big, too. The smoking-can-kill-you memo must be unread by too many. Lucky Strike cigarettes had the fewest discarded empty packs. Marlboro was the runaway favorite, and Grizzly snuff was the most popular in its category.
§ Styrofoam is not biodegradable. It takes up to 500 years for a Styrofoam cup to decompose in the landfill. That’s why I muttered an unkind word every time that I retrieved one from the ditch.
§ Who won the cola-cans-out-the-windows award? Not even close. Mountain Dew outpaced Coca-Cola, 10-to-2. For every Natural Light and Coors product, there were at least a dozen Bud Light beer cans. And that’s not counting the longneck bottles. And who placed first in miniature liquor bottles in ditch? The drinking-and-driving club favors Jim Beam by a wide margin.
That’s not all that I picked up and bagged, but you get the idea.
And if J.P. Morris were here today, I believe he’d agree with me and my unscientific poll results.
Considering the volume of roadside litter, too many of God’s children are just plain trashy.
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com