The Misanthrope's Corner - criticism of volunteerism - Brief Article - Column

National Review, Feb 22, 1999 by Florence King

The cry of terror seldom varies regardless of time and place. Take Scarlett's "The Yankees are coming!" and substitute the Huns, the Roundheads, or the "Melech-Ric!" of Saracens fleeing Richard the Lionheart and you have the voice of raw fear through the ages.

Lest you think that voice will be heard no more as the touchy-feely Nineties turn into the compassionate Aughts, think again. We are already living in a reign of terror and it's going to get worse, but the identifying cry will change. Unlike earlier ones, it will lack vigor and martial clangor and offer no dramatic possibilities whatsoever because you can't make a movie about people screaming "Help! The volunteers are helping me!"

My own history of volunteerism grinds exceeding small, having been compulsory. Growing up during World War II meant taking part in endless school-sponsored collection drives for old newspapers, "tin foil" from chewing-gum wrappers, and empty toothpaste tubes. The latter, being lead-based, were supposedly used to make new bullets, so we had to take them to school where they were piled on a table beside a sign reading "Brush Away the Japs!" supplied by the visiting dental hygienist.

The newspapers we made into hospital bags which, we were told, would be used for the disposal of bloody bandages as well as "bed pockets" to hold the personal belongings of recuperating wounded soldiers. To prove it, they showed us a newspaper picture of a man in a bed with a newspaper bag fastened to his pillow with a clothespin.

Nobody ever questioned it, or asked why, if tin and lead were so scarce, they were used to package gum and toothpaste in the first place. We kept quiet because volunteerism, whether voluntary or compulsory, eats rapidly into the human psyche and sends it on warped paths. One path is the Little Napoleon complex manifested by air-raid wardens during the war and Neighborhood Crime Watchers now. Another is the Little Engine That Could complex that motivates eager beavers. Still another is the Patient Griselda complex found in people eager to prove how much punishment they can take. These are the three faces of volunteerism. Most schoolchildren tended naturally toward group two, while I simply laid low. After the war, when it came out that the stuff we collected was useless and the drives had been devised to make civilians feel that we were "doing our bit" and "pulling together," my natural inclination to pull apart received a terrific morale boost.

The Fifties were a golden age of selfishness, which is the real reason they have been enveloped in nostalgia. Volunteering as we have come to know it today began in the Sixties with Kennedy's "Ask Not" trumpet fanfare. The Peace Corps was a triumph of purified ulterior motives, combining salaried wanderlust with a government-approved odor of sanctity that no one dared sniff too hard for evidence of escapism or desperation. Why else would a widow of 62 like Mrs. Lillian Carter of Plains, Georgia, risk cholera in India if not to do good? It was only much later when we met her family that we caught on.

Ronald Reagan upped the ante with his fondness for folksy stories, constantly telling the one about Alexis de Tocqueville and the volunteer firemen, and stashing selfless neighborly heroes in the VIP gallery at every State of the Union until volunteerism became a bee in the national bonnet, buzzing frantically in the manner of half-understood American ideas, ready to swarm.

The first wave hit in 1992 when Ross Perot turned "volunteer" into a code word for pseudo-democracy, insisting that he could do nothing without his followers' permission because they, not he, really ran things. Whenever he was asked an awkward question he had only to squeak, "Gotta ask the volunteers," and all dared call it populism.

Perot primed us for Hillary Clinton, whose book, It Takes a Village, describes a nightmare of volunteerism in which everybody sponsors everybody else until we have tutored, sustained, and affirmed each other to death.

To this end she sings the praises of her ideal volunteer, Brianne Schwantes, a 13-year-old invalid who helped battle the 1993 midwestern floods. Brianne suffers from brittle-bone disease; her bones have broken so easily and often that her growth has been stunted, yet when she heard about the floods she persuaded her parents to take her to Iowa to help fill sandbags. There she was, barely four feet tall, volunteering her all for her fellow citizens. Hillary doesn't say, but was there a loud crack! that went unnoticed amid all those collapsing levees? Where is this kid now, and how many pieces is she in?

Americans now believe that it takes a village to do everything. We are in the midst of a volunteering frenzy, especially in the suburbs, whose residents have dislodged artsy-craftsy and enshrined grassy-rootsy in an effort to revive a lost sense of "community."

Senior citizens get the worst of it. When not dodging con artists who claim "I just like to help people," they are expected to "mentor" the young like the retired couple in the PaineWebber commercial who invested in no-load mutual funds so they could "work with kids." Open the paper to the Metro Area section and you will find the Mentor Feature. It alternates with the Exhausted Mom Feature about the woman who runs a consulting business from home, gets only four hours' sleep, cooks nothing but fish sticks, irons skirts while wearing them, and volunteers to do the bulletin boards at her children's school so the teacher will have time to mentor the mentors.