Volunteerism: A Bad Thing.

Stop reading if you've heard all this before, but being a volunteer, working in the soup kitchen down in the ghetto, wearing a pink jacket and ushering people around the hospital, ushering at the local community theater, are things typically done by well meaning souls who should simply stop doing this. 

Volunteering or "Giving back to the community" is also very big among professional football and baseball players. Another way of looking at what they are doing is saying, I am paid millions of dollars a year for an activity which entertains, but provides no service essential to the survival of the community, so I'll give a limited amount of time to something really worthwhile, like visiting kids in a hosptial. Now, you will object and you will say, like the arts, sports are essential to the spirit and the soul of the community, and these people are so highly paid because they are so exceptionally talented, and all that may be true, but the work they do could stop tomorrow and society would continue to function. On those snow days, when only "essential personnel" are told to report to work, they don't mean professional athletes. Pro athletes are fluff, from a sociological point of view, unless you are a Republican and still believe in trickle down economics, in which case Mike Tyson is a small business owner who deserves to be spared the estate tax.


Volunteering, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was also a way for the really rich to salve their consciences, those who actually had a conscience, when beset with the question: Why should I have so much when others have so little? So if you were Lady Astor or Electra Vanderbilt, you could spend a morning at the soup kitchen and then go home and change into riding jodhpurs and feels completely absolved. You could live in your estates and host your dinners and feel you'd paid your dues. You were the deserving rich and the rest of them were the undeserving poor.




But this is not really the basis for my objection to volunteers, many of whom come from the middle classes now, and are not rich. They are simply old and retired or they are housewives with a little time on their hands. And they have been told by their President (usually by Republican presients) and by their pastors to volunteer and go out and do good works. Very Christ like. Work with the poor.


But name any job worth doing, whether it's in a soup kitchen, a hospital or a theater and I will show you a job which is worth being paid to do. Volunteers simply take work away from somebody who could use the job and the money more than they do. 


Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and that crack pot crowd are always nattering on about the flood of immigrants arriving to take you job.  That ingratiates the terrified masses to the right wing blow hards, who, don't you know, are for saving what belongs to you and me.  But they never say, hey, there's plenty of jobs out there which the well off steal from the poor by doing for free. Would you be as happy if the waitress was a volunteer? Or how about if the cop was a volunteer?


What about the volunteer fireman? Well, okay, in a rural community where everyone is employed and it's all the local fire department can do to buy a truck, maybe. 


But for the most part, if it's a job worth doing, it's a job somebody should be paid for.