3 hours ago
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Some people buy sports cars when they have a midlife crisis. Others cut off all their hair. Me? I seem to have developed a debilitating obsession with urban sanitation. Over the past couple of years, I have become unhealthily preoccupied with the fact that an alarming number of grown adults seem incapable of disposing of their rubbish properly. There are people in my Philadelphia neighbourhood who will bag up their dog’s excrement and then just leave the little poop bag on the pavement for the rest of us to admire. And don’t get me started on the people who dump untied bags of recycling on the street days before it’s supposed to be collected, resulting in it inevitably blowing around the neighbourhood. (If you’re wondering why the rubbish is loose, it’s because the US, the land of innovation, has been slow to embrace the wheelie bin.)
Do I sound like an irritable middle-aged woman on the verge of demanding to speak to the manager? Oh, I’m just getting started! Here’s the thing: I’m a very enthusiastic rule-follower – assuming the rules are sensible and non-tyrannical. You need rules, both codified and unspoken, in order for society to operate smoothly. Rules about when and how you put your rubbish out. Rules about how you’re not supposed to indiscriminately kill civilians in wars. Rules about how you can’t park your car on the pavement, blocking anyone using a wheelchair or pram from getting by. That sort of thing. And while Philadelphia is a wonderful city, it is rife with low-level lawlessness. Drivers here will barrel through red lights, and routinely park on the pavement or block the pedestrian crossing. People litter mindlessly.
“What the hell is wrong with these people?” I will rail to my wife approximately 99 times a week. Because she is, thankfully, a lot less neurotic than I am, she normally just shrugs her shoulders and tells me to let it go.
But instead of letting it go, I have developed a terrible new habit: I have started confronting people about their behaviour. When someone parks on the pedestrian crossing just as I’m trying to cross the road with a pram and my erratic chihuahua, I don’t shrug and move on with my day. Rather, I have begun to have a little word with them.
If you had told 20-year-old Arwa that she would be confronting strangers in the street about their antisocial behaviour, she would have fainted in embarrassment. I have spent most of my life terrified of confrontation. But something apparently happens to your mortification muscle when you hit 40; it atrophies. To dredge up a quote that is often wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill, “When you’re 20, you care what everyone thinks. When you’re 40, you stop caring what everyone thinks. When you’re 60, you realise no one was ever thinking about you in the first place.”
It’s not just my age that has me in constant fight mode. My obsession with trying to create order in my neighbourhood likely has something to do with the fact that the rest of the world is a complete mess. I can’t confront Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu, so instead I’m going to ask the dude in the absurdly large pickup truck why he thinks the sidewalk is his parking spot.
Politely asking strangers to modify their behaviour can, on rare occasions, result in great things. Last year, for example, there was a Guardian column by Hannah Ewens where, as a sort of social experiment, she courteously asked people who were blasting their music in public to put their headphones on. For the most part they complied and apologised. The experiment, in the end, was uplifting: everyone came out of it looking good.
Unfortunately, my social experiment has gone rather differently. I have not won any friends or influenced any bad drivers. Suffice it to say, I’m quite lucky that nobody has shot me or slapped me.
Still, I’m not giving up yet. I hold out hope that one day my feedback will fall on receptive ears. To quote Churchill (although again, it may have been someone else): “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
