"We can't allow any idle hands," he said. "Everybody's got to be involved." -- Barack Obama.
Can't we just? I'm pretty sure we could if we tried, and I'm sorry to say there are many hands that should remain idle. Involvement in his nebulous understanding of service is not at all appealing either. He's a recruiting machine for the "leave me alone!" party.
Facts are of course no match for misanthropic platitudes uttered from on high, but what holds people back from productive volunteering has nothing to do with a desire for dissolute idleness or a commitment to suckling a poor civic spirt. The biggest obstacle is lack of time. The work week demands a lot from people. In many places it's hard to get to the places and people that need assistance. It's hard as well to find care for the family members who can't fully care for themselves. In spite of that, and according to the government's own figures, "In 2007, 60.8 million volunteers dedicated 8.1 billion hours of service to community organizations." That's formally reported volunteering and it's pretty good. Goodness knows how much more is done informally. On the wildly unlikely chance that it's not good enough, there are better ways to approach it than through sanctimonious eructations. Shorter hours, better pay and public transport would be a good start.
Comments (6)
This guy is following the Bush chap-book to the letter: Volunteerism; moral accountability; no coddling of sissies and welfare scrounges. I hear he's even talking of "entitlement reform"! For f**k's sake, how far right can he go?
Posted by seneca | January 19, 2009 8:26 PM
Posted on January 19, 2009 20:26
I wondered about that -- how far to the right will he go. Pretty far, certainly, as you note. But this seems more like the selective ignorance, officiousness and inability to understand already existing conviviality that one can kind in the typical asshole. He's an asshole. He'd be a discredit to whatever ideology he adopted and whatever party he joined.
Posted by Al Schumann | January 19, 2009 8:46 PM
Posted on January 19, 2009 20:46
What amazes me about the "democrats" is that no matter how lousy I expect them to be, they always turn out to be worse than anything I ever thought they were.
Posted by Michael Hureaux | January 20, 2009 10:37 AM
Posted on January 20, 2009 10:37
Seneca, did you also catch the claim that the problem with "our" health care system is that it's "too expensive?"
He's getting down to doing the things only a Dembot can do even faster than Killiam did...
Posted by Michael Dawson | January 20, 2009 1:11 PM
Posted on January 20, 2009 13:11
"...He's an asshole. He'd be a discredit to whatever ideology he adopted and whatever party he joined."
So there you go. Reason to be happy. He's not in my camp. Being reassured of that is going to make the next four to eight years so much easier to stand. ;)
Posted by ms_xeno | January 20, 2009 1:16 PM
Posted on January 20, 2009 13:16
Ms X my dear, I hate to break it to you but in the four-to-eight-year-run we're all dead.
Posted by gluelicker | January 20, 2009 6:31 PM
Posted on January 20, 2009 18:31