I attended an English discussion this morning. It was just a sudden activity, after I went to a Car Free Day event. I went through the sidewalk, and saw a banner of a multi-languages discussion included English. Others are Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. So, briefly, one of the instructors invited me to join the discussion.
I joined lately, and I was trying to blend with the other participants. The topic was, “how to make X city cleaner?”. Uhm… That was an interesting topic, though it’s already a common issue everywhere in this country. One participant, say Mr. T had a good idea, that according to him, it has to be started from the top, the government. He said that the government has to make a better and clear regulation and rule to solve the problem. Moreover, there had to be penalties or fine to punish the “violator”. Interesting.
Other participants spoke their own opinions about how to cope with the problem. some said, education had to be well to educate the youngsters not to throw the garbage everywhere, and some said that it has to be started from the individual himself. Uhm… pretty good.
Then, there come my turn to deliver my opinion about it. I spoke my thoughts about it, including the government should provide a good infrastructure to prevent the people throw their garbage everywhere (at least there is a trashcan). But the punchline was, I said, “people are lack of sense of belonging”. I think that’s the main cause of why people tend to throw their garbage everywhere, do vandalism thing, damage the facilities, etc.
Then the instructor started to contemplate, and thought that it made him a better person. Which he stated, to have a sense of belonging.
Well, there are so many regulations in the country, there are penalty, however it’s just the people. We, we are lack of sense of belonging. A sense that reminds us not to do bad things, cause we know that we belong to each other, including the neighborhood, the environment.
