Let’s establish a requirement that every able citizen contribute some dues to the organization known as The United States of America.
Joining the military is not a bad idea. I did it. I stayed 20 years. I know a lot of folks who stayed longer, and even more who stayed only a few years. Most of us went to places we otherwise never would have seen. Many of us learned something about other cultures. Most of us, even if we “got out” at the earliest opportunity, were proud of having “been in.”
But there are other ways we could support this place that rewards us so well for just living in it.
There was a time when the local fire company did not want for volunteers. Its members quenched house fires, or at least kept them from becoming whole-town fires.
Times and technology and the expectations of the community have changed. More time and training is required of those who would serve.
I lived in a town for several years where the emergency dispatcher was a man who was made blind from, as I recall, an errant snowball thrown when he was 12. He knew every street and road, every member of the fire and ambulance crews, and every birthday and wedding anniversary in the department. Listening to a scanner was to hear congratulations for a job well done at the end of a particularly harrowing mission.
The entire ambulance crew was “fired” one night at a town meeting. A resident stood up and told the townspeople volunteers no longer were good enough.
“If I have a heart attack,” he said, “I want someone to show up at my door who can help me.”
He wanted the equipment and the drugs and the expertise that could be provided only by paid medics who were on duty 24-hours a day, assigned to a hospital where they could practice their skills regularly in a way they could not if they simply sat around waiting for the occasional heart attack in their town. His neighbors agreed and the ambulance company moved into history.
By the time he died, McGillicutty also had been replaced, by trained communications experts. Flowers were planted in a small park built and named for him.
Volunteer fire departments have rescued cats from tall trees, and held Bingo games and pot luck dinners. They were, and a shrinking number of them still are, social organizations, bound together by life, sweat, common risks in the service of their community, and occasionally death.
The Elks Club in the place I now call home has closed from lack of membership, and other organizations are fending off a similar fate. Some of them, if they don’t close, will merge with a chapter in another town. With each demise, another service to the community disappears.
We have supplanted service and community involvement with text messaging and made up names, and we are shocked when youngsters whose sole community lies in a computer screen or cell phone are assaulted by ogres who dwell with them in cyber space.
A friend suggested community service be compensated with a tax credit. That seems a fair contract. Even conscripted soldiers and sailors were paid. The pay was not up to private industry standards, but it was augmented by the knowledge they met a responsibility in keeping safe the privileges that came with being a citizen of the United Stated of America.
They had paid their dues, and purchased the right to help determine the way their community is governed, and made an investment of time, sweat, and sometimes blood, that made them want to exercise that right.
The service has to commit every capable young person to an investment in the community. It could be monitoring the skateboard park a few hours a week to make sure if someone is hurt, someone else is available to help. It could be mentoring a teen who does not have family or fire department or social organization to help them guide their lives on a reasonably straight path.
Without that investment, the community organization is destined to expire.
Ask the Elks, or your local volunteer fire chief.
©2008 Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net
