Making Captain Planet Proud

I was eating dinner with some of my kids. When I say "my kids" I refer to students who I mentor, not as in legal dependents. Normally the kids I mentor are in either high school or middle school. Its a rare circumstance that I have a single group with both ages in it.

I'm not sure why they are called "my kids." My mentor when I was in high school called us his kids, and my peers now who volunteer their time to other teams do the same. I think its just an idiosyncrasy of the league we all compete in.

Anyway, so I was with my kids. We were at a BBQ with easily 400 people at it which was hosted at my university. They had mostly finished their food and so I brought out the bags of candy I had purchased for them and opened them. One of the girls sat down next to me with her candy

"I don't want to put my soda can in the trash," she said.

"If you're willing to walk a bit I know where you can recycle it."

"They are throwing out a lot of soda cans."

"Yes"

"Do you think if I got another shirt from the car and put it on so nobody knew I was from our team...and maybe was really sneaky...that I could pull all the cans out of the trash and put them in a bag to be recycled?"

"I don't see why you would need to hide the fact that you're doing a good thing."

"I've always wanted to do it but I'm too nervous to do it alone. I'm afraid people will think I'm weird if I do it all alone." She looked contemplative for a moment and then turned to me as her face brightened up. "Will you help me?"

"What?"

I was at this point pretty stuck. I'm not altruistic enough to want to go digging through the trash just to make mother nature smile, but this seemed like it was a pretty big deal to the kid. Acting like her idea was childish seemed somehow emotionally the equivalent of stomping on her face. Besides, how many high schoolers do you know who give a flying fuck about anything that isn't themselves? How could you possibly discourage the one kid who does in front of all of her peers, and in doing so potentially even embarrass her for it?

"Yeah," I said, "sure I'll help you."

Two more kids followed us around and assisted with holding the trash bag and various other things while the first girl and I started pulling cans from the trash. It was absolutely nasty.

The kid seemed absolutely thrilled though, and seeing how happy she was doing this pretty much made up for how nasty it was to go through bins of Styrofoam plates and half-eaten burgers. Thankfully they had only been there about...half an hour tops. I'd also like to take this moment to announce that people who jam their napkins and the rest of their meals into the tops of their sodas are dickwads. I was kinda amazed though how much food was in that trash can. It seemed a crying shame that they had taken that food in the first place and not just left it for somebody else if they did not want to eat it.

We filled the better part of an industrial trash bag with cans. One girl stopped and mentioned she had been considering doing the same thing, and by the time we were wrapping up a reasonable number of high schoolers had showed up from various teams and begun asking if they could help us too. The student who originated the idea was pretty much beaming.

"Hah," one of the mentors laughed, "this your new team fund-raiser plan?" The girl waved the bag proudly about for a moment and the mentor laughed. "We can be team 'can do', one can at a time." I rolled my eyes because I loath puns but not an hour later I found somebody had written the new slogan on the back of our team's robot in black sharpie. The students were thrilled about it. They toted their trash bag of cans around with glee. If I had thought I could have gotten a picture of it without wrecking their moment I would have.

So today I either taught some kids a valuable life lesson about doing the right thing when you think you know what it is, or possibly simply exposed them and myself to a variety of communicable diseases. Perhaps both. Whatever, I'd do it again. The look on the kid's face was pretty worth it.