There is a sense that you do this because you ought to (as with the National Day of Service on King Day, or a campus day of service for students).
Sunday, September 07, 2014
I "volunteer" and keep it simple; 105-year-old Holocaust "rescuer" makes an important point
OK, today I volunteered, and it was an exercise in
pure karma building.
In Arlington, the AFAC, or Arlington Food Assistance
Center, has been conducting “stuff the bus” food drives with Arlington Transit
busses. After an email from AGLA, I
volunteered to do the last shift, which consisted of packing and unloading the
items and ‘sandbagging” then into the facility. The green bus had been filled all day at a
nearby Safeway. The whole process took
about 75 minutes.
This is one of those experiences that is
impersonal. You sign in, and initialize
a liability disclaimer.
There is a sense that you do this because you ought to (as with the National Day of Service on King Day, or a campus day of service for students).
There is a sense that you do this because you ought to (as with the National Day of Service on King Day, or a campus day of service for students).
There’s a debate at a nearby local church as to how
personal volunteering should be (even though when that church refurbishes a
group home for the disabled, the clients leave for the day). I’m not into personal interactions that are
supposed to make something “all right”.
But I realize there is a downside to that attitude: how, in a democratic society, does everything
get a real chance if it is OK to exclude contact with people you somehow don’t
approve of? Think of the downstream
implications.
The activity will continue next weekend. It seems like it is mostly about building “social
capital”.
At still a different church, at a potluck after
service, there was a little issue when a woman with a small child took extra
food to pack up and take home. I would
say, if she was low-income, that should not be an issue at all. This is the simplest possible opportunity to
help someone in need with no fluff, no politics, no over-commitment, no
over-personalization, no ideology.
I don’t usually cover TV reports on this blog, but I
thought I would mention the story of Nicholas Winton, now 105, broadcast on CBS
60 Minutes tonight, link here. Winton helped children of Jews in
Czechoslovakia leave (through Germany) and get to England in 1939, until Sept.
1, when the invasion of Poland started.
But one caveat is that a child could not be booked for England until a
family was found to adopt it. This rescue has also been called the "Kindertransport". (That became a 1998 film by Kevin MacDonald and Fran Robertson, produced by Steven Spielberg, which I saw in Minneapolis in 1998.) Imagine
the same situation today with refugees (from Central America) if it worked that
way. So have social and economic
conditions favorable to “families” forming actually can be critical in the long
run.
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