Please, stop littering on campus
Cigarette butts thrown on the ground make the university filthy

By Brandon Ortiz
Skiff Editorial Writer

Take a look around campus, and what do you see? Students.

Well, yeah. Besides that.

Look on the ground.

You see cigarettes. Lots and lots of cigarettes.

There are cigarette butts littering entrance ways to nearly every building on campus.

Entrances to residence halls are especially filthy.

Why?

Because smokers, for some reason or another, throw their cigarettes on the ground instead of throwing them away in a trash can or ashtray.

It’s dirty and disgusting, and it makes the university look trashy. Something needs to be done.

So I ask smokers a favor, and in the nicest way possible, because I know how cranky you guys can get: Please throw your used cigarettes in the proper place.

The walkways paved in cigarettes looks tacky. For a school that spends so much on grounds keeping, it’s amazing it will tolerate such mass littering.

There is nothing worse than walking to class and stepping on several hundred (if not thousand) cigarettes on the way.

If smokers don’t do this on their own, then more drastic measures should be taken.

Now before I go into further detail about this fascinating topic, I want to announce that I will be in Bermuda for the next month. So all you cranky smokers, ticked off that someone could say such heresy, will have to wait till I get back to kill me.

Additionally, I will acquire a concealed hand gun permit (for all you non-Texans, it’s legal down here). I will have to look into seeing if I can carry it on campus (probably not), but at least I will be safe everywhere else. So if I run into trouble from angry smokers, I too will have a smoking rod.

Of course, I’m not really going to do all of this, but I probably should. I hid a pack of cigarettes from a friend of mine once, and when he found out it was I who hid them, he tried to stab me with a spoon. Smokers get mad about this kind of stuff.

The least I’ll do is to be extra careful not to be out in public in the morning or after meal times — popular times for smokers to do their thing.

One last thing, I don’t take death threats very well, and I don’t drive a black Geo Storm. Really, I don’t.

With that out of the way, let me ask the university to do this: If smokers don’t stop throwing cigarette butts on the ground in a fair amount of time, then ban smoking on campus.

This is not an attack on smoking. If somebody wants to smoke outside, good for them. More power to them. But when they litter the university, it’s not fair to the rest of us.

Students pay a lot of money to go to this school. For what they pay, it should at least look nice.

And for what I am going to pay for my hideaway in the Caribbean, it better have running water.

Brandon Ortiz is a freshman news-editorial journalism major from Fort Worth.
He can be reached at (b.p.ortiz@student.tcu.edu).

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