Trash can bring us together

Believe it or not, politics doesn’t hold the pole position in the race to win a community’s heart.

Community spirit does. It wins every time, even when it exercises addition by subtraction.

That equation and eventual proof was on full display Sunday, when 81 volunteers accepted the Civic Engagement Alliance’s Trash Tag Challenge.

What those sun-drenched volunteers accomplished — the subtraction thing — was picking up nearly 170 big bags of trash along I-90. Granted, there’s probably still another 1,700 bags that could be filled with all the litter from Coeur d’Alene westward, but the volunteers put a serious dent in the mess.

While that work was obvious, less apparent to the unsuspecting eye was that volunteers didn’t give a hoot about anybody’s political or religious background or preferences. It also didn’t matter if you were there because your company, like Macy’s, was backing you up, or you were a member of a whole family that came out to do something good close to Earth Day.

Only one thing mattered: Cleaning up where we live, keeping it pristine despite what the elements or careless drivers have been doing through the winter.

This year’s Trash Tag Challenge, part of a national movement, zeroed in on the stretch of interstate west of Post Falls because of letters to the editor in The Press. A number of writers lamented the horrible amount of litter along the freeway, wondering how it could get so bad with nobody stepping forward to clean it up.

Well, Jessica Mahuron, founder of Civic Engagement Alliance, took that as an organizational challenge, mustered forces for good and made a difference. Jessica & Co. did not wait for a government solution. They didn’t hold their breath waiting for sheriff’s labor “volunteers” to pick up the mess. And they sure as heck didn’t simply decide to look the other way every time they drove that stretch of highway.

We applaud Sunday’s terrific teamwork and hope that kind of community spirit is contagious. It might prove to be the most effective antidote to political poison.