9:20am | I don’t know anything about The Den Barber Salon, beyond the fact that on multiple occasions they have (directly or by proxy) leafleted my motorscooter with one of their business cards.
Even if I didn’t cut my own hair, these business cards would be garbage, garbage that suddenly becomes incumbent upon me to dispose of. And whether it’s The Den Barber Salon—which for all I know is the best barber salon on the planet—or any of the thousands of businesses that have leafleted my vehicles over the years, I always resent the imposition.
Admittedly, the imposition is slight. Nonetheless, I shouldn’t have to dispose of your garbage—whatever form that garbage takes—any more than you should have to dispose of mine. Never mind that the garbage in question is intentionally created and passed along to me without my consent.
I’m using the word ‘garbage’ very consciously here, because it points to part of the principle involved: this practice of leafleting creates a large amount of litter. Inevitably some of the leaflets fall off the vehicles and onto the ground, littering our streets.
Then there are the many people who resent the imposition in such a way that they refuse to dispose of the leaflets, instead simply tossing them off their vehicles. And I have to say, this is the closest I ever come to being sympathetic to littering—because it’s really not the vehicle-owners’ garbage, but the businesses’.
It seems there is no legal remedy here. Sometimes courts have found the freedom of leaflet content to be separate from the freedom to place them wherever you like on public property,1 but Klein v. City of San Clemente (2010) seems to have pretty much tied a city’s hands when it comes to legislating against the practice of leafleting cars parked on public streets.
My disappointment here is tempered by my love for the First Amendment, any interpretation of which should err on the side of permissiveness. But while the First Amendment is not concerned with littering, we should be. And so, what to do? Should we accept the status quo as an inevitable part of life in Long Beach and in these United States, or might there be some redress, some way to dissuade businesses from leafleting our vehicles?
Consider that if someone from The Den Barber Salon were walking down the sidewalk dropping one leaflet after another into the street, he could be ticketed for littering. But were his drops skillful enough so that each leaflet caught the wind and landed on a parked car, that would somehow be okay, as if my vehicle is me and a leaflet placed on it is one I’ve willingly accepted. But my vehicle is not me: it’s just an object, every bit as inanimate as the asphalt where the leaflets would be recognized as litter by law enforcement.
But at present there exists a right to litter on your car, so long as the litter can be seen as some sort of speech act. That the speech acts in question usually are advertisements (as opposed to, say, political tracts) is a sadly capitalistic twist on the First Amendment.
Unfortunately, it’s not exactly news how often capitalism and environmentally friendly praxis do not go hand in hand.
Footnotes
1See, for example, Jobe v. City of Catlettsburg (2005).