Dear Editor:

Now that the election is over, let’s change our focus. Michele Valliere wrote the most important of all the Letters to the Editor in last week’s edition. Not about politics! Litter! It’s outrageous. The sides of our roads in beautiful, scenic Maine are turning into dumps. Beer bottles, paper, fast food containers, liquor bottles, tires, unidentifiable trash and even full garbage bags. Why do so many people not realize how wrong it is to throw whatever they want out their car windows? Do these people realize we are DOT workers to pick up all this mess? Back in the 1960s we attacked this problem with a national ad campaign featuring a native American looking over a road littered with garbage. He had tears in his eyes. The ad campaign worked. People stopped littering. Would another national ad campaign work? Could the networks and local stations take some of the billions of dollars they got from political ads to do some public service announcements?

I wrote a letter to my state representative about this two years ago, calling for the legislature to pass a bill requiring hefty fines for littering. I never got a reply.

Are Michelle and I the only two people who care? Come on guys, let’s do something!

Paula McKenney

Woolwich