Mayor John Dickert started his administration well on Saturday by setting a good example. With his wife, Theresa, Dickert has planned a project called Renew Racine which will emphasize cleaning up the area along the Root River during the next six to eight months.

"It's easy to talk," Dickert told a Journal Times reporter. "It's better just to do it."

Those are true words, and they should serve as a motto for everyone in the city. There is much to be done, and we should not restrict ourselves only to the doing which accompanies Make a Difference Day.

That annual celebration of community in October was begun by former Mayor Jim Smith, and it has proven to be a driver of citizen participation. Dickert's project not only builds on that other tradition but it expands the time of service. Truly, service should be year-round because there is more than a day's work to be done, and who else will do it?

Hardly a week goes by lately without some sort of complaint about taxes and government spending, but as we have all seen, those taxes and that spending have real effects. Tall grass on highway medians attests to what government does and doesn't do. Here some citizens have already started to make their own difference. One area resident, fed up with tall grass and weeds on a public road, took matters into his own hands and cut them, and the City of Racine since last year has offered people the opportunity to adopt a section of road for maintenance.

When citizens complain loudly about the burden of taxes, politicians listen and the effect is a limit on taxation, which also means government must set priorities on what it does with the remaining money. It chose services other than a regular mowing of highway grass. So citizens have a choice: Pay more taxes, quietly accept the results of limited spending, or do the work ourselves.

Taxes are a replacement for citizen labor. We pay other people to do the work we want done. In communities where there is less money and fewer people, citizen volunteers run the fire departments. That is community service at its most basic, and it is no different from schools or other organizations where parents or members are expected or required to contribute a certain amount of their time.

One of the characteristics which earned the so-called greatest generation that label was its acceptance of duty. Those people lived through the Great Depression, then through World War II, and while they undoubtedly complained-they could hardly have been human if they didn't-ultimately they did what was necessary. Consider the current financial condition of government a similar if smaller test for us. Do we complain endlessly, or do we follow the mayor's example and get things done?