Community Service

Our Greenway is going to be EXCITING!

Every year about this time, we have Community Service Day.  The whole school wanders out all over the place and does "stuff".  Today I helped clean up the area that will be part of the town's new Greenway.  I'm pretty excited about it and hoping it will create a nice town common.

But before we get there, we had to do some Source to Sea cleaning so we went out behind one of the local grocery stores.

It was appalling.  We pulled three shopping carts out of the gully and left two in that we couldn't pry loose.  We filled about 20 garbage bags with trash and other non-organic debris.  After dropping the kids off, I went back to do another hours worth of work, because I couldn't let it go, how it looked down there.  Plastic bags hanging from briar branches like evil buddhist prayer flags.

My hands are torn to shreds and I'm sore as hell, but mostly I'm ashamed of our town.  Leaving the site, I scanned the parking lot and saw trash everywhere.

Generally speaking America has gotten better about litter, but that parking lot was an embarrassment.  An embarrassment to my town (which has more than its fair share of embarrassing features).  It is part and parcel of a selfishness in our neck of the woods that says, "I don't care about the commons, I care about not exerting myself to do the very least I can do."

Awful.