Well, I left my community service to the last minute. Though if given the opportunity to do this again I probably wouldn’t choose to put such an assignment off, the scrambling my carelessness bred ended up yielding a unique opportunity culminating in what I found to be some pretty interesting conclusions.
After all organized group community service outings had passed and a mere three days remained before the assignment deadline, I was left with few options. I decided to begin my service by picking up trash for a few hours at Belle Isle–easy, enjoyable given the weather, and a prime opportunity for some good, old-fashioned alone time. Like many of my classmates have mentioned in their posts, some of the stuff littering the island and its banks was no less than revolting. It was then while picking through the cigarette butts, beer cans, and food wrappers that I decided to spend my remaining hours over the remaining two days scouring the same island to monitor and compare the way the litter accumulated on a day-by-day basis.
The following day, I returned to coves between rocks patches of trail that I had left clean and free of litter the day before to find that the invading matter had found its way back. Some of the litter was old: dirty, torn, and blown in by the wind or borne by the changing tides. Some, however, was new, fresh. This cycle illustrated the concept of humans as an irreverent in the face of the natural world in terms more poignant than any I’ve experienced before. How could someone come to this place–this green, rushing, vital place–and so carelessly inject their ugly, poisonous refuse? After only a few hours that day, I had had enough.
After this veritable loss of faith, returning the third day was no easy feat. However, while dodging bikers and dogs as I crossed the bridge beneath the highway, I felt my bitterness dissolve and flow downstream when I noticed a group of middle-school aged kids and their chaperones bouncing down the banks carrying trash bags and wearing rubber gloves not unlike my own. Just like me, they passed the group of chain-smoking hipsters stretched out on the rocks like lizards in the sun and they probably also picked up the stubs of cigarettes and dented cans of cheap beer after they left too. Sure, that island and this city and this planet are full of negligence, environmental and otherwise. But for all the negligence, there’s at least a fraction of mindfulness, passion, devotion, and care.
In the eight hours I spent on Belle Isle, I realized that the reason we do community service isn’t just to clean up someone else’s mess. The need for service typically arises from an inability or failure of an individual or small group to reach a certain milestone. When that need is answered, it’s usually by volunteers in an equally small numbers filling in the gaps because reaching that milestone is essential to the healthy functioning of the community. When we go to Belle Isle or Pony Pasture or the Westhampton Lake to pick up trash, we don’t go because we want to do what others don’t, we go because we care about the health of our local ecosystems because that’s something that benefits us all. I’m not breaking any new ground when I say that this is what makes community service at its core one of the most altruistic, selfless practices–individuals devoting their time and effort for the advancement of a network of their brothers, individuals in service of the community.