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Stress and uncertainty can do crazy things to our minds. We snap at people we love, become short and rude to people online, and become super judgmental of situations and circumstances we neither understand or are privy to. It happens to all of us. I get it. But it’s time to take the foot off the accelerator and slow down this runaway train.
Life is super weird right now. There is stuff we know, and a ton that we don’t. It’s easy to let your mind run away from you.
That’s why I decided to do something physical this weekend. I joined a young man I admire and helped pick up trash in the city of Duquense.
Scott Presler was first motivated by President Trump’s calls to clean up Baltimore last summer. Several news outlets had chronicled the filth, trash, needles, tires, rats and dilapidation in several Baltimore communities. Scott was moved by the images. And so, when Baltimore’s elected officials made no discernible effort to take charge or mobilize action, a young, openly gay and proudly conservative supporter of America and the President stepped up. Scott’s mission to Make America Clean Again was born.
In the year since, Scott has traveled the country, galvanizing a movement that takes no money, just time. And heart. And love.
He posts on social media an exhausting schedule and visits city after city, encouraging locals in those towns to grab rakes and shovels, work gloves and plastic bags and join him where most people dare not go.
I heard Scott’s call this weekend and loaded up the back of my Ford F-150 with a varierty of gardening supplies.
At the corner of Second and Hamilton in Duquesne, I joined 60 other strangers, divided perhaps by circumstance but united in mission: to stop talking and start doing.
We spread out across ten square blocks and pulled bottles and cans and plastic and paper out of newly-budding shrubs. Filthy diapers. Fast food remnants. Decaying stuff I can’t even describe. Every town’s got some.
Neighbors driving by slowed to stop and rolled down their windows. “What are you doing?” they asked. “Just trying to help out,” we replied. “God bless you,” or “You people are angels,” or “You have no idea how much that means to us,” came the overwhelming responses.
All it took was two hours. We’d packed dozens upon dozens of bags with the garbage we’d found, said goodbye to new-found friends with “Corona Kicks” of our work boots rather than handshakes or hugs, and got in our cars and trucks tired, but satisfied.
That’s when it hit me.
We can’t control what’s coming in the days, weeks and months ahead. But we CAN control how we respond to it.
I guess I never figured black garbage bags and work gloves could be what it takes to bring strangers together.
Perhaps tonight when I come home from work, the boys and I will take Murphy for a walk in the neighborhood. I’ll take a bag with me just in case I find an opportunity to do what Scott Presler does: commit, rather than complain.