Every day I walk to my lunch table for second lunch, and I am disgusted. Sauces coat the table (especially on spicy chicken sandwich day), chunks of brown crusty bits and smashed green smudges that may once have been beans build a landscape of ruin.

Often times, students get caught up in the everyday demands of their lives that they forget the basic things they learned in kindergarten: clean up your own mess and put things back where you found them.

Our busy lives do not excuse the mess we leave for each other in the cafeteria every day.

We need to make a conscious effort to respect the people who scrub the floors shiny, scour the tables free from filth, removal all evidence of our waste to make school a pleasant, clean and safe environment for us. Without the custodial staff the whole school would look like our lunch tables after third lunch.

One of the custodial staff’s jobs is to put away the tables after lunch and generally clean the floors. After each lunch shift, the cafeteria staff along with the custodians rushes to clean up all remnants of trash off the tables for the next set of students. Sometimes the trash gets so bad that Mrs. Bell even has to help. This is not in their job description.

The custodians’ job is not to pick up after us since we are fully-function human beings who can bend over and pick up things ourselves. The only places where we can expect that kind of service are five-star hotels where we pay for it or nursing homes and hospitals where we can’t do for ourselves. If I am at a restaurant and I drop my napkin, I pick it up.

Trash cans are conveniently placed at every exit of the Commons, so no matter where we are headed, there is always a trash can located on our way to class. There is no excuse not to throw away our trash; it just takes a conscious effort. At home, we would never leave trash out all over our tables, so we should not to it at school either.

Being in high school, we have reached a certain level of maturity and freedom. With any freedom comes responsibility. We have the privilege of eating outside, so we need to take responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves or such privileges will disappear, which they should. If we cannot handles throwing away an apple core into the trash can three feet away then we do not deserve such privileges.

Sometimes, people leave trash on our tables and walk away. We should begin to pick up even that trash regardless whether it is ours. We are already on our way to the trash can, so one more piece of trash would not kill us. If we all pitch in a little bit, we can make this school better and cleaner for us all.

We have the power to transform the landscape of filth into the pristine, clean cafeteria we all deserve.