The Greensboro Atheist Organization adopted a highway recently, and the work they’re doing to keep the highway clean is just pretty damn cool and deserves some positive attention.
Calvin Spealman, the co founder of the GAO, spent his morning climbing into ditches and digging out the nastiest of debris including condoms, a crack pipe, and tons of fast food garbage.
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The Adopt a Highway program is important to us as a group, both because environmentalism is incredibly important — this is, for right now, the one and only planet we have. Sorry guys — no apocalypse or eventual heaven on earth or anything like that. But also because it gets us out into the community, doing our part to help those around us, get our name out there and helps people realize that we exist, even in North Carolina — even in the bible belt.
I know this type of volunteer work isn’t as “sexy” as donating blood or feeding the homeless — those things directly help strangers and we can even imagine the faces of the people who benefit from the atheists’ generosity.
But cleaning up a public highway benefits many more people in a much different way. There weren’t a lot of people there to help the GAO this time around — only four people showed up — but I hope that’s only because local atheists just didn’t know it was going on… it would be amazing to see how much work a dozen (or more!) of them could do the next time.