Imagine waking up one morning, walking to the bathroom, groggily lifting the toilet seat...and staring right into the beady red eyes of a white rat. Not a great start to the day, but it's a reality for residents of a neighborhood near the University of Arizona. Several people there have experienced the nightmare of rats coming out of the sewer system and into their house.

I'd planned to write about something else today until I read this morning's newspaper. The opinion page was inundated by readers responding to last week's front-page article on the pollution-plagued blighted jewel that is the Anacostia River.

This past summer, a spinach e-coli scare was front page news for days. But before the recent front-page Washington Post article, most readers probably never dreamed that more than 2 billion gallons of raw sewage pour into the Anacostia River every year.

Nation-wide, the figure is a mind-boggling 860 billion gallons of raw or partially-treated sewage that flow straight into our rivers and streams.