The good news and bad news about volunteerism in America

July 7, 2006

USA Today ran an encouraging front-page article today about Americans who are [tag]volunteer[/tag]ing their time more than any time in recent memory. There’s just one detail the article left out.

College graduates, shaped by such events as Sept. 11, Hurricane Katrina and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are applying to service organizations such as [tag]AmeriCorps[/tag] and the [tag]Peace Corps[/tag] in record numbers.

“I do think that recent world events have heightened awareness among college students and their desire to do good,” says Elissa Clapp, vice president of recruitment at Teach for America. […]

Today’s young people prefer to channel their activism into helping others directly rather than through politics, says Nancy Crocker, director of Academic Community Engagement Services at Arizona State University. Many are more attuned to volunteer services because colleges and high schools increasingly offer courses and credits for “service-learning.”

In terms of the numbers, USA Today noted that AmeriCorps*VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), which pairs recruits with non-profit organizations, has seen a 50% jump in applicants since 2004.

That’s the good news. The bad news is there won’t be slots for these applicants to fill because [tag]Bush[/tag], after vowing increased support for AmeriCorps and other national service programs, gutted them.

Beginning next year, the White House would reduce funding for the AmeriCorps National Civilian [tag]Community[/tag] Corps from $27 million to $5 million with the goal of closing it down, according to the president’s budget. About 81 full-time staff members would lose their jobs.

Created by President Bill Clinton in 1993 as a kind of domestic counterpart to the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps is a network of three federal programs devoted to youth service in areas such as education, health, public safety and the environment. Participants in all three become eligible for education grants of $4,725 to pay for college or to repay student loans.

Nothing fosters a national commitment to public service, particularly when an interest in volunteerism is at an all-time high, like eliminating most of the government’s national service programs.

***Sarcasm mode switched on….

Well, we can’t have our young citizens doing constructive, beneficial community-service work that’s not under the fascist jackboot of the Religious Reich—now can we?

***Sarcasm mode switched off….

  • The last thing the Roveublicans want is any entity suggesting that, as Americans, we’re all in this together. Patriotism isn’t expressed by helping to build communities or strengthen families; it’s expressed through magnetic stickers on gas-guzzlers, ostentatious outrage at theoretical flag desecration, and of course hating liberals who hate America.

  • This fits perfectly, however, with yesterday’s thread on the Statue of LadyFrankenChristLiberty, where the good reverend said it was ok to spend a half-mil on kitsch instead of the poor because he didn’t want to step on Jesus’ poor-helping turf. It is also consistent with a late night link I posted on that thread where a wingnut was complaining that the Episcopal Church supporting the UN’s Millenium Development Goals to reduce poverty was placing faith in the UN above faith in God. It appears the New Republican’t Theology is that our only role here on earth is to engage in either capitalistic or militaristic activities; anything else shows a lack of faith in God to take care of the do-gooding.

  • There’s another thing the USA Today article leaves out: The baby boomers are among the least likely to volunteer. It’s also incredibly misleading about how many young people volunteer.

    The Mrs. is the volunteer coordinator for Habitat ReStore (a project for Habitat for Humanity) here in KC, so she deals with stuff on a daily basis. Simply put, our parents’ generation simply doesn’t volunteer — she’s tried to encourage that generation to do so, but they don’t.

    The younger generation may volunteer in record numbers, but they don’t do it consistently nor do they sustain it (this includes Gen Xers such as myself). They’ll put in a few days here and there, but that’s about it.

    This isn’t to scoff at the numbers completely — it’s great that so many college grads are signing up. But keeping them volunteering is another story altogether, and they’re parents and grandparents aren’t exactly setting shining examples of how to do so.

  • All this volunteerism, and the Army has to scrape the bottom of the barrel with “personality disorder” psychopaths like Stephen D. Green and his little crew of morons.

    (In Green’s defense, he did grow up in Midland, Texas, and as we see from another prominent former Midlander, “personality disorder” seems to be something that comes with that territory)

  • You’ve heard those ads on Air America calling upon people to participate by not eating for 30 hours? “Become a part of the solution. Make a statement. Learn what it feels like to be poor. Change your world forever.” Etcetera, et-nauseating-cetera.

    If this isn’t a bit of baby boomlet (children of the baby boom) psycho babble I don’t know what is. Not eating for 30 hours (when you’re probably overweight anyway) doesn’t teach you what it’s like to be poor. Being poor means you’re stuck in an income hole from which there’s no way out of. It’s not a fleeting *feeling*; it’s a structural fact. “Making a statement” is easy. “Changing your world” isn’t the same thing as “Changing the world”.

    Many in the generations raised on TeeVee have the attention span of a hamster. That’s why they vote for George Bush or not at all. That’s why they’re not tearing down the campuses or acting up anymore. Nothing matters. Nothing will change except the surface features. Bread (and not much of that except through borrowing) and circuses (also through borrowing).

    I’m not looking forward to this Fall’s elections. Not at all.

  • ***That’s why they vote for George Bush or not at all.***

    From my experiences, a great many of those who do not vote choose to do so because they are no longer offered candidates worthy of their collective votes. Stop offering up back-peddling, always-on-defense whiners—and get these people a political carnivore to stand behind, instead of these cantankerous lesser-of-evils types, and you just might see “Herr Bush” on the evening news—kicking and screaming—as he’s being forcibly dragged from the Oval Office by an indignant electorate.

    You will not—I repeat—WILL NOT—shame people into voting either for, or against, the moronic simian who currently occupies the White House, by simply offering upon the “Sacrificial Altar of The Vote” a milder/meeker version of what the political animal has become. If the Dems want to win—and, by winning, it must be with the sole intention of wiping the scourge of Neoconservativism, along with its evil twin, the Religious Reich, from the face of the Earth—then the Democratic Party must, by nature, become a more powerful carnivore. You cannot defeat the hungry wolf by being a sheep—you must transform yourself into a bigger, meaner, stronger, hungrier wolf…or find yourself on the wrong end of the food chain….

  • Steve, you’ll have to trust me when I say I ask this out of honest curiousity and not to argue against your point. In fact, I almost entirely agree with your point and in the past have posted similar things. Here, however, is my cognitive dissonance: Isn’t your last sentence precisely the Neocon argument against applying the Geneva Conventions (to use but one example) in the GWOT? Again, just to be abundently clear, I detest this administration and its tactics as much as anyone, but in large part that is because of their truly incomprehensible incompetence and lack of intellectual curiousity. On the other hand, I am likely more hawkish than most around here – so I ask myself, if Clinton in 1998 had wanted to do more than just toss a few cruise missles OBL’s direction, and had argued “look, these are some nasty, irrational, uncivilized folks and we wont beat them by being civilized,” would I have accepted that because the messenger was better?

    I’m just having trouble at the 30,000 foot level squaring the argument many of us here make in favor of gloves-off campaigning with our simultaneous opposition to gloves-off combat. maybe i’m overthinking this — obviously the stakes in terms of actual lost lives and limbs is very, very different, and there are realpolitik downsides to gloves-off combat in terms of world opinion. but at a strictly philosophical level, it seems we aren’t being entirely consistent.

    anyone want to talk me down from my dissonance on a Friday afternoon, or is the simpler answer to just knock off early and have a tall drink?

  • I would try but I think my brain just exploded. Go for the tall drink, Zeitgeist. First round’s on me. 😉

  • Zeitgeist–
    I think I see what you’re saying, which is one of the reason’s I partially disagree with Steve’s assessment.

    When trying to defeat an enemy (no matter how or where or in what manner) it is important not to become the same as that enemy.

    That’s why I don’t like the “win at all costs” philosophy for elections, and why I’m vehemently opposed to many of the practices our military has used in the war.

    The minute you throw aside what you stand for, just for the sake of winning, you have become the very thing you were trying to destroy.

  • The minute you throw aside what you stand for, just for the sake of winning, you have become the very thing you were trying to destroy.

    “To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement.”
    — Phillip K. Dick

  • Rambuncle–
    You know, I’ve heard of PKD (I LOVE Blade Runner, which I know is based on one of his works), but never read anything by him (after reading 300+ books in college to earn a Lit degree, I kinda got burned out on reading and am just now getting back into it).

    I’m thinking that I should make a run to the library this weekend and pick up some of his stuff …

  • I think, Zeitgeist, that there is a fundamental difference between the Neocon (“they”) and that portion of humanity who are still connected to reality (“we”), in that we can be peaceful until it is time to become ugly—and once the need to become ugly has passed, we can become peaceful again. The US has demonstrated this facet of its internalized philosophy time and again through its short history on this planet. They, on the other hand, cannot perform this metamorphosis, because the ability to transform back, from the beast to the “fuzzy critter,” means that they would have to lay aside their flag-robes, and their zenophobia, and their sabre-rattling soundtrack of fearmongery—and expose themselves as the withered-thing image that “unending ugliness” has wrought upon them.

    Think of the MGM classic, “The Wizard of Oz.” For this current administration and its ilk, they can only be “the Great and Powerful Oz” by hiding behind the drawn curtain, playing with gadgets and gizmos, and puffing themselves up into “a big scary thing” that holds the sole intention of cowering the masses—endlessly, and without remorse, to shield themselves from being discovered as a collection of bumbling snake-oil peddlers. We, on the other hand, possess the ability to change back, once the big scary thing is no longer needed. We can lay down the mantle, and go back to the scarecrow’s cornfields; the woodsman’s cottage; the lion’s forest; the windswept prairies of “Youth and Toto-ism.”

    Idealism? Perhaps. But once upon a time in America, we had ” a guy named George” in our history who, after the hostilities of the Revolution had ceased, stood before Congress and relinquished command, choosing instead to “go back to his farm.” He could have been a king or an emporer—but he decided to be that scarcrow; that woodsman; that lion; that kid-and-dog duo from Kansas. I seem to recall that someone named a city after him. Washington, I think….

  • Steve – thank you. I would like to think that well described the distinction. I think we can count on the Right living down to their end of that description; it may be that our burden as progressives is to continually live up to ours.

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