How to Love Thy Neighbor

There are lots of ways to love thy neighbor, most of which non-religious people affirm as well as religious people. Many of these ways are costly and time-consuming. I cannot afford the time or money to go help people in the latest war-torn site of starvation, disease, and despair—at the moment, I cannot even remember where this is. Yemen? South Sudan?

But there are some very simple ways, also. For example, by not throwing your garbage in the street or, especially, in your neighbor’s yard. I mean, how hard is that to figure out?

You can quickly gauge a community’s sense of spiritual love by counting the number of pieces of garbage in public areas. Oklahoma, where I live and work, is in the middle of the Bible belt and ought to be the place in the world most permeated with the love of God. But this is what I have found, based on actual count:

• Tulsa: My wife and I walked along residential streets and through about a mile of city park land along a creek, total distance of about 1 ½ miles. Total number of garbage items: 1,325 plus or minus about 15. This is 833 pieces of litter per mile.
• Durant: I walked about six blocks (about six tenths of a mile) through my neighborhood, and counted 640 pieces of garbage. Some were in my yard, but I did not put them there; they were things I would not even have bought. This is 1067 pieces of litter per mile.

(The image above is not from Oklahoma.) This garbage was everything from chunks of furniture down to cigarette butts. All of them were visible without having to stop and look closely.

American evangelicals like to consider France to be a spiritually desolate country, because most of its Christians are people the evangelicals will not admit are Christians. But in Paris, which is notoriously dirty, the number would be far less than the approximately 900 pieces of garbage per mile typical of my Oklahoma samples. I was too busy to count while I was there, but I’ll bet it’s around 100. And in Strasbourg, it would be about 20, or even close to zero. The French people, especially outside of Paris, are thoughtful of the environment they share with their neighbors.

Since you were wondering, only one of the pieces of garbage—in a parking lot in Tulsa—was a condom.