Three tons of garbage were removed from Westwood streets on
Sunday by about 100 students and a whopping two non-student Village
residents.
The semi-annual trash pickup, called Operation Clean Sweep, is
sponsored by the City of Los Angeles Board of Public Works and
brings fraternity members and non-student residents together to
clean up the Village. The fraternities did their part ““ 16 of
18 houses were represented and they even brought along members of
one sorority.
If the homeowners of Westwood are going to badger students about
the mess they make of the Village, the least they could do is show
up when students decide to clean up the city. It may not be their
mess entirely, but the best way to foment change is by leading
through example.
Operation Clean Sweep was supposed to bring students and
non-students together and cause all residents to take better care
of the Village. Instead, homeowners moaning about living in a
college town where people are noisy and intoxicated on the
weekends, failed to take advantage of their best opportunity to
improve one of Westwood’s fixable problems ““ its
abundance of litter.
Students certainly shouldn’t be proud of the mess they
make of the Village on a regular basis, but homeowners should be
ashamed of themselves for failing to remedy one of their primary
complaints about the Village. Three tons of trash may have been
removed from Westwood on Sunday, but non-student residents
certainly didn’t pull their weight.