The volunteer state - Presidential summit on volunteerism

Progressive, The, June, 1997

The Presidential summit on volunteerism was the feel-good hit of the spring.

The media gushed all over it. Volunteerism got two thumbs up on the covers of all the major newsweek-lies. Colin Powell, the star of the show, was everywhere: dressed as Uncle Sam (he wants YOU!) on the cover of Newsweek, schmoozing with John Kennedy in George magazine, heaped with praise on the television talk shows.

Americans were encouraged to drop our disagreements, suspend our disbelief, and join the bipartisan love-fest in Philadelphia during the Presidential Summit on America's Future.

We got to watch President Clinton and former Presidents Carter, Ford, and Bush pose for photographers as they cleaned up graffiti. We got to watch Bill and Hillary make another treacly pitch for reading to tots, and then subject five Philadelphia children to their rendition of The Giving Tree. We got to hear Nancy Reagan exhort us to "Just Say Yes" to helping children.

And if all that wasn't enough, we got to hear Democrats and Republicans agree that "big government" can't help the needy. "The answers to our kids' problems -- illiteracy, fatherless families, teenage pregnancy, drugs, whatever," as George Bush so artfully put it, "lie not in Washington, but in our own neighborhoods."

Here were the most powerful government leaders of the last three decades assembled to discuss the needs of the poor in America. And here is what they came up with: There's nothing government can do. It's up to all you volunteers to fix the major problems of our nation. Rather than spend public funds to rebuild schools, reduce infant mortality, feed the hungry, or provide health insurance to some forty million uninsured Americans, President Clinton announced a new $27 million government initiative to encourage volunteering.

The President just struck a budget deal with Republicans in Congress that cuts $68 billion from existing domestic programs. On the eve of his election, Clinton signed a welfare bill that his own Administration estimates will plunge at least a million more American children into poverty.

Now he says it's up to private charities and volunteers to pick up the pieces. But the problems discussed at the Presidential Summit on America's Future are not private problems. Many of them are, in fact, uniquely government's to solve. The sorry state of our public schools and the health-care crisis are problems volunteers can't fix.

The people who do the serious work of running America's food banks and homeless shelters are horrified by the suggestion that they can cover for government callousness. Catholic Charities USA has objected loudly to Clinton's suggestion that charity can make up for the cuts in government programs for the poor (see "Girding for Disaster," March issue). The Food Research Action Council estimates that all the food in all the food banks in America would have to increase four-fold just to make up for recent cuts in the Food Stamps program.

"You hear these speeches and you want to retch," says Colman McCarthy, a writer and activist who has spent his life encouraging people to volunteer to help the poor. "Here you have government, a major causer of the problems, and here's their solution -- you go do it!

"You can't criticize the young people who volunteer," says McCarthy. "They're good-hearted kids, and they didn't cause these problems." But, he points out, volunteering is no panacea. McCarthy encourages his students at Georgetown Law School to give their time to a literacy program in Washington, D.C., and to the local soup kitchens and homeless shelters. "I've had hundreds of students go off campus and come back and say how wonderful this is -- it really changes the way they think and live. It helps the servers in obvious, immediate ways." But how much it does to solve social problems is another question altogether.

Despite the obvious hypocrisy of the Presidential summit, the press was largely silent. Instead of pointing out the gap between the rhetoric about helping those in need and the reality of budget cuts and increasingly meanspirited public policy, we got an earful about the great American penchant for volunteering.

"We are perhaps one of the most generous and philanthropic people on the face of the Earth," Powell declared. The media repeated this message ad nauseum. There were endless reports on the twenty billion hours of volunteer service Americans put in every year.

"Come a catastrophe, like the recent floods in North Dakota, and Americans turn out in droves to place sandbags and help victims," The New York Times giddily editorialized during the summit.

Why the lack of critical reporting? Journalists want to feel good, too, Steve Waldman, national editor of U.S. News & World Report, explained. "I think there is an underlying deep-seated sense of guilt in the press about being too cynical," Waldman told The New York Times. "This is your chance to redeem yourself, by doing journalistic good."

And so we had Jonathan Alter of Newsweek praising ex-general Colin Powell's "new war" on the domestic threats of poverty and despair: "The new threat required a new alliance -- one that's grand enough to muster the troops, but practical enough to let them volunteer every other Tuesday night after racquetball."