Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Making volunteerism popular

Derrick Z. Jackson’s column on national service in yesterday’s Boston Globe ties in nicely with some thoughts I’ve had concerning the difficulties that local first aid squads and fire departments are having attracting volunteers.

Jackson rightly commends both presidential candidates for encouraging Americans to play their part in making the nation a better place. But he also makes it clear that a rhetorical commitment is not enough. McCain, Jackson writes, “has made only vague pledges to support AmeriCorps,” while Obama is pledging

to spend $3.5 billion to bolster AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, the Foreign Service, and launch an Energy Corps for environmental cleanups and renewable-energy projects.

That’s a good start, but may not be enough.

While Obama, and eventually McCain, hopefully, duel it out on asking us to do our part, they should be clear with Americans that volunteerism is not, as it too often is couched, something for the young adult or the retiree. Obama says, “People of all ages, stations and skills will be asked to serve,” but often overlooked in the AmeriCorps/Peace Corps paradigm is the American in between in their late 30s, 40s, and 50s.

The sad fact is, the national rate of volunteerism has barely budged over the last four decades. According to the federally created Corporation for National and Community Service, the level of adult volunteerism, 23.6 percent in 1974, was 26.7 percent in 2006. That last number actually represents a slight decline from a post-9/11 spike that reached 28.8 percent. While it can be argued that today’s volunteering still represents higher levels than the 20.4 percent of the Reagan inspired me-myself-and-I 1980s, it also means that over the last three decades, three-quarters of Americans still do no volunteering in their schools, churches, and other civic organizations.

And no one knows this better than local fire departments and first aid squads. As we reported last week — in a story that we seem to have to write every couple of years — keeping enough volunteers trained and working is not easy.

”It’s really hard to find volunteers in the area because it can take a lot of time that people may just not be willing to give,” said Joe Erickson, a member of both the Monmouth Junction and Kingston rescue squads. “Especially with the economy the way it is some people just don’t have the money to put towards gas to go back and forth to the station.”

The crunch hits the day-shift hardest, which is why the township worked with the squads to create a paid service funded by health insurance.

In the end, unless significant changes are made in the way we treat volunteers — assuming what they do is secondary to their paid job and forcing them to balance their family life against their volunteer activities.

As Jackson says, volunteerism needs to be “but part of a larger plan to improve American family policy.”

It is difficult to see how much more volunteering Obama can inspire out of active parents while the United States has some of the developed world’s least developed family leave policies and shrinking vacation time. Obama has promised improvements on sick leave, but there also ought to be a national provision for
employers to give workers time for their volunteering. That way, everyone might have a chance in putting their foot firmly into the current of history.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Pointless presidential posturing:Four topics that should be tabled

My column this week, which will be posted on Thursday, will focus on the relentless noise that has been obscuring real debate this presidential season. Here are four topics of discussion that have served to do little more than distract us:

1. The experience question:
While Sen. McCain has been touting his resume — former Navy pilot and prisoner of war who has served in Congress for 26 years, the last 22 in the Senate – implying that his opponent’s is a bit thin, there is nothing about his experience that would suggest that he is better qualified for the nation’s top office than Sen. Obama.

After all, we are not talking about some novice who woke up one day after owning a baseball team and decided to seek office. Sen. Obama has served in government for 11 years four in the U.S. Senate and seven in the state legislature in Illinois, and has worked as a community organizer, civil rights attorney and constitutional law professor.

The simple fact is that there is no experience that can prepare someone to be president. After all, President Ronald Reagan, by way of comparison, served eight years as governor of California and was an actor and corporate pitchman before that. And conservatives didn’t seem at all concerned that the experience of their candidate in 2000 — the current president — paled in comparison to his opponent, a sitting vice president who had served more than two decades in Congress.

Experience is a convenient argument to trot out when you have little else to talk about. The question, in the end, is not experience but vision and how the candidates’ pasts might shape their work in the White House. So let’s talk about vision and leave the resumes for the human resource people to peruse.

2. Flips and flops:
In 2004, Republicans tagged U.S. Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, as a flip-flopper because of his vote on the funding of the Iraq War. Sen. Kerry voted against an $87 billion funding bill for the Iraq War in 2003, while proposing an alternative bill that would have provided the money but tied it to a repeal of some of the Bush tax cuts.

It was a standard legislative maneuver, but one that was easily painted as trying to have it both ways. And, thanks to a masterful advertising campaign by the GOP — along with attacks from outside groups — Kerry looked weak and ineffectual.

Fast forward to the 2008 race and it difficult to see how either candidate can benefit from raising the specter of the flip-flop. Both candidates have taken what charitably can be called “nuanced positions”: McCain on the Bush tax cuts, the torture ban, public financing, Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right; Obama on the FISA vote and public financing.

This is to be expected, however, given that both have spent the bulk of their public lives as legislators whose primary job is to compromise to get things done. Compromise, however, doesn’t play well in the current, 24-7 cable/blog culture.

3. Religion and the preacher question:
Both candidates have used religious affiliations to enhance their political viability – Obama proclaiming his faith publicly and endorsing faith-based public programs, McCain by reaching out to rightwing preachers after calling them “agents of intolerance.” They’ve also both experienced blow-back because of their connections to pastors (the Revs. Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger for Obama; the Revs. John Hagee and Rod Parsley for McCain) that should offer enough incentive to leave religion out of the debate.

4. Patriotism:
Arguments over patriotism in a presidential contest are about as useful as arguing over which sports teams the candidates support. Both candidates are patriotic Americans and this little pissing contest demeans both and the concept of patriotism in general.

Enough of these issues. Let’s talk about the economy, the environment, health care and the war.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.