Dear future self,

Last fall I woke up, looked at the clock: 7:15 am, the usual. I washed my face, got dressed, grabbed my bag, said bye to mom, and ran for the schoolbus. As I took my seat, pulled out my phone, and plugged in my earphones, I began to feel drowsy. Remembering that I needed to study for my Spanish test, you know the one, on Preterite vs. Imperfect, I popped in a piece of Orbit Sweet Mint to help me feel refreshed and alert. Half studying, half dozing, I realized the bus had already arrived at school. I took the gum out of my mouth and stuck it below the seat, as I did every morning. That’s when I felt the huge chunk of solidified gum underneath me. As you know by now, feeling this wad of used gum, which I was responsible for, made me realize how careless and selfish I was being.

But it wasn’t just me, I hunched over and did a quick scan under the other rows, and every sagging plywood bottom beneath the leather cushions was littered with balls of colored gum. Something had to change.

The next day, I wrapped my gum up in a kleenex, carried it off the bus with me, and disposed of it in a trash can, but I still didn’t feel better about the situation. Perhaps because I’m a New Yorker, I’ve gotten used to the ubiquity of litter, but the stalactites of used gum opened my eyes to the disturbing plethora of trash bits covering the sidewalks. Even as I was reflecting on the excess of refuse, a classmate of mine walked by, chucked his empty Doritos bag at the trashcan, missed, shrugged, and went on his way. Something had to be done about my generation’s diffusion of responsibility problem.
My hope for 2014 is that globally, people my age will step up to become more environmentally conscious and proactive, but on a smaller scale, I want to personally jumpstart such efforts at my school. No one pays attention to posters since they plaster every inch of hallway space, so I’m bringing attention to the problem in a more interesting way, starting with the gum.
I knew that yet another public service announcement would fall on deaf ears, so I utilized a strategy that was sure to appeal to adolescents: gossip. Spending a few days observing the kids at my school, I realized that the perpetrators were mostly lower and middle school students. They were young children who had no doubt been instructed not to litter, but were simply not mature enough to grasp why the act was irresponsible. Getting their attention was easy: I asked a few friends who had younger siblings to tell them that someone had written a secret code for saving the Earth on the bottom of the bus seats in the 2nd-to-last row. All they had to do was look up. I arranged with the administration to keep the bus unlocked for a few hours each afternoon, and voila, kids were spending their lunch periods and recess time trying to get their hands on this magical, mysterious message. But all they saw was the constellation of gum hovering about them, blocking the secret to saving the Earth.
When I placed two trash cans on the front and back of each bus, I noticed that kids started pulling off the gum, bit by bit, in a gradual, collective effort. I emailed the principal of the lower school in order to ask for a favor; he was amused by my odd methodology, but praised my efforts and even went so far as to confirm with the lower schoolers in an assembly that the rumor was indeed true. The lower schoolers’ desire to become the ‘hero’ who saved the earth exponentially increased and many more students were searching for this message. However, when the all the gum was gone, and nothing was found under the seats of the buses, grumblings could be heard around the playground that the rumor had been a lie. All they had revealed was a clean piece of plywood.
And that, I explained when I presented at a lower school assembly, was the whole point. Using a projector, I showed a picture of gum, a mess of garbage we’d all created together, juxtaposed with an image of the plywood, something we’d made clean through collaboration. We can do something small to make a mess, I told them, or do something small to undo or even prevent one, but every action adds up.
And so, future self, I hope that you’ve taken this lesson to heart, that you’re living it, not just preaching it to younger kids, that you don’t feel disheartened by the magnitude of the task in front of you. All you can do is take responsibility for your own actions and encourage others to do the same, and slowly but surely, NYC might cease to be a glorified trash can.

Best wishes,

Junyoung