El Cajon is a depressing, depressing place.

So I take Siobhane to the library today. She rode in the stroller with me down Main Street the mile or two length of our itinerary.

There are many problems in El Cajon. Striding down the main throroughfare is not a skip down a sunny promenade with happy faces, men tipping their hats to ladies and children with pudgy, red faces, furiously at play. This once sleepy farming community allowed proliferation of very cheap housing in the late 1970s, and now the effects are visible with each step.

Litter is horrendous. Absolutely unacceptable. You cannot pin down exactly who would do such a thing as throw their trash on the ground and walk away, but a close inspection of the trends in this city are: homelessness, prostitution, drug use. Six years of living here and none of it is any better than before. This is still the only place I have lived where I have stepped in human excrement!

That did not happen today. I was disappointed that the strip mall next to us does not have any plan to clean up the side of their building. A trash bag was opened a few yards from our door, its contents spilled out. Of course, this corner always smells like urine when I walk by. Who is going to clean it up if that management company does not? They need to get somebody out there with gloves up to their shoulders and get it cleaned up.

Not many businesses are willing to clean up past their storefront to the gutter. The aftermath of the recent Mother Goose Parade was appalling: despite a trash can every few yards, it did not seem like the vast majority of persons pitched in. Today, outside a hardware store, I saw a female employee end her break by rubbing our her cigarette and leaving the butt on the sidewalk - adding to the collection already there. Disgusting.

Municipally, how the hell do we solve this problem without trampling on people's rights? I say that businesses are ultimately responsible for their storefronts. I would propose a city ordinance requiring at least a daily cleaning or rubbish, with businesses in non-compliance getting a fine.

But then there are the litterbugs: fast food container-throwers, cigarette-butt tossers, late-night beer-can chuckers. They are truly the problem. How do you police the world against those who are indifferent to the disgraceful and lazy act of littering?

That I don't know. I thought there was a very hefty fine for littering, but really, should cops be everywhere cracking down on littering when there are more important things to patrol?