To the Editor:
Over the Memorial Day weekend, I noticed an abandoned shopping cart behind Jefferson-Houston School, so after a few days I dragged it home and called the city’s service line. I have no idea how a shopping cart found its way miles from that chain’s nearest store. Later the police department called back, saying they’d alerted the store manager who would send someone by to pick it up.
Three days later, it was still sitting in front of my house and hadn’t yet been picked up, so I dragged it to the DASH bus stop, but the driver wouldn’t let me on (he even confirmed with the dispatcher) because it couldn’t be collapsed so it might block the bus’s aisle. So I dragged it to the Metro station where the Metrobus driver was more lenient after I explained the shopping cart was getting off before I did. I had to put my leg through the cart to keep it from rolling around when the bus accelerated/decelerated, went up/downhill, or made a corner, vaguely reminding me of what had happened, some decades ago, when I had brought a Halloween pumpkin I had bought on the bus. When the bus stopped in front of a store in that chain, I kicked the cart out so it rolled into the store’s entryway patio. Apparently, the store hadn’t missed it while it was gone, couldn’t be bothered to pick it, and wouldn’t notice it any more than “just another shopping cart” now that it’s back.
The park across from where I used to live in D.C. found itself with a similar problem. For whatever reason, shopping carts from the shopping center over a mile away found their ways to the park. So I called the police who, initially at least, gave me a number to call some outfit that collects and returns shopping carts, but the shopping carts kept collecting in the middle of the park, so I dragged them into my back yard. Eventually, after I raised the topic at a public meeting, the police sent an officer who loaded them into his police van and returned them. Around this time, the neighborhood had started to experience a homicide spike — eventually amounting to 15 in a decade in five blocks of my house there.
I am an unwavering devotee of the “Broken Windows Theory” and believe few things scream “neighborhood that doesn’t give a hoot” more than abandoned shopping carts.
Dino Drudi
Alexandria