Sometimes the question isn’t how good or bad you are compared to other people, it’s simply what are you willing to put up with yourself.

In a story in today’s Observer, an officer with the Colquitt County Compliance Office acknowledged the problem of people dumping trash along the county’s roadways, but he said based on conversations with his colleagues in other counties, they have a bigger problem than we do.

Nonetheless, it took a reporter only about 10 minutes to find two broken toilets dumped along the side of Sardis Church Road with a stuffed black trash bag thrown over a fence a short distance away.

We send our condolences to the counties that are worse than that.

When we posted the story to our website Monday afternoon, we quickly got a comment on Facebook: “You need to come down my dirt road. It’s used as a dumping for all kinds of stuff.”

The writer didn’t say what road she lives on, but we suspect there are plenty that her comment could apply to.

Is this the view we want visitors to our community to see?

Some have made their opinion clear already. Two years ago, the Moultrie-Colquitt County Chamber of Commerce teamed up with the city and county governments to host clean-up days ahead of the Junior and Senior National Diving Championships.

“We want to put our best foot forward and really show off our community,” chamber President Tommie Beth Willis said at the time.

But we have visitors every day — businessmen, travelers passing through, football fans on Friday nights, and now officials and prospective students of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, which will open in less than a year.  Don’t we want to show off our community to them too?

Or maybe not. Maybe their opinions don’t matter to you.

But let us ask this: What kind of community do you want to live in? How clean or dirty do you want your drive to work to be?

What are you willing to put up with?

And if you’ve had enough of looking at trash bags and broken toilets — or piles of tires or whatever else someone has dumped — contact the Compliance Office at 616-7417 (in the county) or the City of Moultrie Public Works Department at 668-5423 (in the city).