between the lines| by jack cashill

The Untold Saga of the Voluntolds

True story.  A few years back, during a large-scale community clean up project, I came across a listless crew of teen volunteers.  The girls stood in a loose circle talking fashion.  They were dressed to the nines, all tight skirts, loop earrings, and platform shoes high enough to parachute from.  The boys stood in a closed circle, passing a doobie. 

Out of curiosity I asked their organizer why the teens weren’t doing any work.  She replied that they didn’t have any work gloves.  I then asked why she just didn’t get them gloves.  She answered that if she got them gloves, they would just lose them.  Hard to argue with that logic.

These teens represented a new trend in volunteering: they had to be there.  They are no longer unique in their absurdity.  Let’s imagine, for instance, an area-wide event called “Kansas City Clean-Up Day.” This is not much of a stretch as there are comparable events throughout America.  Who mans them?  Well, among the many legitimate volunteers — the church groups, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the greens — is a whole new class of workers like these teens, what folks in the volunteering community charitably refer to as “The Voluntolds.”

Here’s State Senator Mike Inebrio lazily swinging a scythe and working off some of those 200 hours of compulsory community service for his latest DUI.  Here’s star NFL running back, O.J. Carruth, sweating away his most recent wife-beating penalty by signing autographs for the other volunteers.  Here’s that senior class from Suburban High filling their compulsory community service requirement by toking up until their work gloves arrive.  They sure as hell won’t pick up other people’s trash without them.

Organizing the whole event — or trying to, given their limited skills and training — are the selfless volunteers from AmeriCorps.  True, they receive, on average, about $12 an hour in salary and benefits — more than many of them in this virtually qualification-free program could make on the open market — but in today’s world, that scarcely diminishes the scope of their sacrifice.  No, for many Americans, especially the younger ones, volunteering ain’t exactly what it used to be.

Bowling Alone

Despite the fact that Americans donated $190 billion of their money and 20 billion hours of their time to charity last year, some observers worry about the state of the nation’s soul.  Among them is Harvard political scientist, Robert Putnam, author of the much-discussed new book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

Putnam takes his vivid title image from those bowling alley proprietors who lament that league bowlers are becoming as obsolete as pin boys, and that people are left to bowl alone if at all.  The reason, Putnam surmises, is that the classic American sense of free association, much noted by Tocqueville and others, is collapsing like a dwarf star into the black hole of self-absorption. Putnam argues that the dollars donated have not kept up with the growth of real wealth and that real, uncoerced volunteerism is dying off with the veterans of WWII.  He backs up his assertion with enough statistical and anecdotal evidence to convince.

Putnam suggests a number of reasons for this phenomenon, but curiously cites TV as the number-one culprit.  By pulling people away from one another, by desensitizing them to genuine humanity, and by exposing them to materialism run amuck — case in point, the astonishingly vulgar, “Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire” — TV and “its electronic cousins” unravel the traditional American sense of community.

Changing Channels

No doubt, television has played a part in the slow demise of community spirit, but I would not nominate it for a starring role.  Radio, after all, had a similar impact on the family without the consequence to the community.

In truth, the problem runs deeper.  I suspect that it is largely the governmentalizing of most good-deed-doing which has caused the fixation on “self” to blossom. After all, why help out Aunt Sally if Uncle Sam will do it?  A symptom and consequence of the problem is the slow transformation of volunteers into voluntolds. 

Take, for instance, the case of a community hospital.  It used to be that if the citizens of the community did not voluntarily pitch in to build and staff a hospital, they would have no hospital.  And since adults then routinely cared for their own children and parents, it was natural to extend their well-developed sense of caring to friends and neighbors.

Today, it is the rare adult who cares for a parent and the rare young adult who even has a child.  In fact, many young, childless adults will choose to become old childless adults lest a rugrat interfere with their cherished “life style.”  As to the local hospital, the smaller cities and towns in America’s heartland still take their responsibility seriously.  But elsewhere, the government and large mega-insurers pick up just about all the slack.  So why bother helping out, unless, of course, candy-striping nets the striper some hard core credit for graduation or at least looks good on a college application?

Some voluntary associations do thrive today, but many of the newer ones are less likely to advance the good of the community than the fulfillment of the individual.  Typically, these are the groups dedicated to the drying out, the buffing up, or the consciousness-raising of that glorious entity, me.  A century ago, as their diaries reveal, young women strove to be better sisters, better daughters, better friends.  Today, they strive to have better bodies.  To succeed, they read magazines called Self.

Volunteers of America

“All across the country,” our soon to be ex-president orated at a recent AmeriCorps shindig, “AmeriCorps volunteers are serving as a catalyst for community action.”  Amidst the toy gun buy-backs, the puppet shows on earthquakes, and the still-unfinished quilt for Oklahoma City bomb victims, I am sure there are AmeriCorps workers who have done good things.  But AmeriCorps itself does not so much catalyze community action as it does confound the whole concept of community.  In fact, the program puts community action on a cash and carry basis and, like other such programs, strips the word “volunteer” of any real meaning.

Happily, real volunteers do still exist — more in the middle of America, I suspect, than elsewhere.  These pages are full of them and their wondrous deeds.  To understand the difference, go, for instance, to an Optimist Christmas tree lot in 30 below wind chill or a soup kitchen staffed by volunteers on Thanksgiving Day or even to the upstairs room where a devoted daughter takes care of her dying parent and ask yourself how much you’d have to pay a voluntold to get him to do what these folks do for free. 

I don’t think $12 an hour will cut it.

The views expressed in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram’s Magazine.