After Proposition 13, Volunteers Needed

By LANCE MORROW

The oldest military wisdom advises: "Never volunteer for anything." Americans have traditionally ignored the precept. The U.S. has been famous as a nation of volunteers--minutemen, barn raisers, candy stripers, charity collectors, Rotarians, Elks, D.A.R. committeewomen and radical activists. "Probably in no other country in the world," writes Sociologist Daniel Bell, "is there such a high degree of voluntary communal activity, expressed sometimes in absurd rituals, yet often providing real satisfactions for real needs." Gunnar Myrdal once observed: "It is natural for the ordinary American when he sees something wrong to feel not only that there should be a law against it but also that an organization should be formed to combat it."

Against the massive American joiners' impulse, that get-it-done communitarianism, wholesome if sometimes Babbitt-like, there has, however, run a lonelier strain in the national character. It is a tendency toward independence, individualism and even cynicism. Some argue that the coming of the New Deal, with its gigantic interventions by the Federal Government into every corner of national life, damaged the voluntary and co-operative spirit of Americans and induced a certain civic abjectness. Bureaucracies assumed larger and larger responsibilities to clothe and feed and mend and regulate and punish and advise the people: to tell them how fast to drive and whether a mother could keep a man in the house. In relieving Americans of so many burdens, government may also have removed a certain amount of the moral ballast of responsibility from individuals and communities.

In recent years the idea of volunteering for things has suffered from what looks almost like a conspiracy of trends. Constantly rising prices have driven men and women to earn more to meet their bills; they have that much less time to work without pay at helping others. Simultaneously, professionals in such fields as hospital work have complained that volunteers take paying jobs away from them. The feminist movement has militated against the tradition of women volunteers. Four years ago, the National Organization for Women passed a resolution arguing that almost all volunteer work done by women is exploitation. The work needs to be done, of course, but NOW claimed that in a just society necessary work is paid for. Since then, NOW has somewhat modified its dogma.

Finally, the psychically preening, Rolfing, esting, self-servicing looking-out-for-No. 1 narcissistic movements of the era have taught that only a sucker infected by a loser's guilt would spend his time in the self-abnegation of volunteer work. Ayn Rand meets Werner Erhard at this intersection: self-sacrifice, in this mentality, reeks of spiritual fraud.

But reality has a perverse way of ignoring trends. After all, the idea of selfless voluntary service is deeply laminated in centuries of Judaeo-Christian civilization. It therefore should not come as too great a surprise that Americans seem to be volunteering more today than ever before. No one knows the exact number of people in the nation now doing volunteer work. In 1974 a survey conducted with the help of the Census Bureau put the figure at 37 million--one out of every four Americans over the age of 13--and estimated the value of their work performed during the year at $33.9 billion. A recent Gallup poll showed that roughly 89% of urban residents would be willing to volunteer some form of work or aid to help their own neighborhoods.

Somehow the nature of volunteer work has changed. It no longer smacks so much of noblesse oblige, no longer involves so many upper middle class worthy ladies earning the passage of their privilege. Volunteers today are as likely to be college kids working on weekends to clean up wilderness areas, grandparents teaching pre-school children, or minority women organizing demonstrations against slum landlords.

The private organization called the National Center for Voluntary Action recently gave awards that illustrate the variety of volunteer work now being done, to 1) a group in Nashville that saved its state's only hospital treatment program for chil dren with severe emotional disturbances; 2) a doctor in Kensington, Md., who created four "mobile medical care" units, mini-clinics that operate from vans at local community centers; 3) a task force in Dallas that helped peacefully integrate the city's school system; 4) a woman in Washington who founded the House of Ruth, a crisis center for destitute and battered women; and 5) a Honolulu woman who started an effective volunteer group for state residents who, like her, are deaf.

The line that used to divide traditional "do good" work from social activism and advocacy has nearly vanished. Mary King, deputy director of ACTION, the federal volunteer agency, argues that "people are sick of macro answers to micro problems. There's a growing awareness that people can do the work themselves." George Pickering, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Detroit, has accurately described a difference between volunteer work today and more traditional charity labor: "Today, the demand for participation is real. It is not a demand to become a client of some program. It is not a demand for therapy. It is a demand for access to the world."

There are two compelling reasons why volunteer work is, as California Governor Jerry Brown has said, "a necessity for a civilized society." First, as is becoming increasingly clear, there is and ought to be a finite limit to the ser vices that government can provide. California's Proposition 13 has proved that taxpayers are willing to cut services even cruelly and self-destructively to reduce their tax loads. If many necessary services are to be provided, volunteers must do the work--particularly in child care centers, nursing homes, libraries and alcohol abuse programs. One of the most persuasive practical arguments for volunteering is that it will reduce, by many ergs, the amount of work that bureaucracies must do. Thus, there is the sweetness of having somewhat thwarted the impersonal state. Says Brown Assistant Charles Baldwin: "Proposition 13 will be the real test of the individual citizen to accept the responsibility."

As the proportions of men and women doing volunteer work become more nearly equal, the feminist objection to volunteerism as a female ghetto may recede. In any case, the needs to be fulfilled transcend the politics of sex. And of age as well. The talent pool of retired Americans, growing larger each year, is an immense resource that should be exploited more, to staff day care centers, for example, and to perform more sophisticated jobs too.

The second compelling reason for volunteer work involves the individual and collective soul in any culture. A society's morale is always healthiest during a war (one that it supports and is not losing badly); everyone is forever volunteering for something: rolling bandages, running canteens--feeling helpful, a part of things. Contrary to the narcissistic sects now working the Pop culture, plumping egos like pillows, the individual spirit flourishes best in useful contact with others. And the collective spirit cannot thrive when individuals are all arcing around in their small green capsules of self-regard.

In this sense, self-sacrifice is precisely and generously to one's own advantage. One need not play Maoist work songs (in China, they've got to do it, which is not volunteering) to understand the social advantages of work voluntarily done for the good of other individuals, the group as a whole and, ultimately, one self. The benefits of volunteering can be entirely practical for the volunteer, of course: a person might, for example, learn much about becoming a professional librarian through volunteer work. But it is in the nature of things that the ultimate good of volunteering lies in a kind of metaphysics of sheer human usefulness. Herman Melville wrote: "We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results."

-- Lance Morrow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.