Homework for Bloggers.
(Sound of man climbing atop soapbox.)
I have to make a request of my readers: on this Saturday, May 14th, the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) in conjunction with the U.S. Postal Service and a handful of generous corporate sponsors, is conducting the Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. You may have already received a post card in the mail announcing it, but I will outline the program regardless: before your carrier arrives on Saturday, you simply place any sealed, non-perishable, and non-glass packaged food items in a bag at a visible location near your mailbox. Your carrier picks it up and takes it to the station, after which it is transported to an area food bank. It couldn't be any simpler.
What I am asking is that everyone place at least one item out for pickup on Saturday. It's a small sacrifice that will quickly be forgotten, but combined with the efforts of others gathered 70.9 million pounds of food last year alone. That's an awful lot of help for people going through some tough economic times.
Since charity seems to always be oddly politicized, I'll address it briefly from that angle: if you are a conservative who believes that the government should stay out of your pocket and stop redistributing wealth, here is a great opportunity to bolster your argument. Make all of this Robin Hood do-gooding unnecessary by your charity, and you'll have that much more street cred next time you rail against high taxes. If you are a liberal, who believes empowering the poor and oppressed is the duty of all, then I shouldn't even need to tell you why donating here is a good idea. Now you get to say that you live what you speak. This stuff is golden across the spectrum.
So everybody: at least one item, please. I'm doing it and I'm absolutely broke. You know there's canned asparagus in that pantry somewhere that you were never going to eat. Give it up.
(Sound of man stepping down from soapbox.)
posted by JPS at 5/12/2005 10:29:00 PM
13 Comments:
I'm doing a box of pasta, some Ramen noodles (hey, I eat them) and maybe some other stuff. You make a funny and true point about the "unwanteds." When we used to do food drives at my Catholic elementary school, people would donate oh-so-useful things like canned pie filling. Hey, that's about seven components shy of being an actual edible product. In a perfect world, this call actually asks people to go to the store, buy staple food, and donate that, but I would rather people do something than nothing, so I kept the shout-out low-key so that anyone who wishes to can participate. Anything is better than nothing, even if it means poor folk spoon pie-filling out of a can to stave off a little hunger. Sometimes, calories are calories. Your suggestion is taken to heart nonetheless.
(Sound of man getting on soapbox.)
If every able-bodied adult offered one additional hour of their time per year, that would create 200 million or so labor hours to accomplish charitable goals. That's one full time year for 100,000 people in labor, or the yearly staffing of a Fortune 500 company. Think you couldn't get some things accomplished with that? One hour more on average from everyone. That's all that would take. Yeah, some people are already doing as much as they can. Gosh, that means totally inactive people might have to give two or three hourse a year to keep the average. I think that's workable.
(Sound of man stepping down from soapbox.)
As in stuff 300-500 years old that may or may not be covered in a survey course: the acknowledged classics like Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, and Jonson, but also much lesser known stuff like Kyd, Middleton, Dekker, Farquhar, Wycherly, Congreve, Webster, and Fielding. As far as moderns go, I like Ian Banks, Martin Amis, and the not-so-scholarly-or-esoteric Douglas Adams. If you can name two works off of the last half of the former list of authors without a Google search, you win a prize.
Wrote it on a woman? Did she squirm much while you were writing it? I don't know if any of my friends have patience enough for several days of lying down without washing, but maybe you have very tolerant and ink-fetishist friends. I think I'm probably more comfortable with typing, though :).
You get double bonus points for mentioning a Congreve play other than The Way of the World, the one everyone who reads him by obligation knows. I'd buy you a drink, except that you're underage and live 1,000 miles away from me.
You should post your paper. I'd love to read it.
If I can be a downer for a minute. The essence of your “one hour a year” idea is admirable and thought provoking but your math and Fortune 500 company comparison is woefully flawed.
While it is true the number 200,000,000 when divided by 2000 (average number of hours worked in a year) does work out to be 100,000. However, your supposition that 200 million single hour work units taken from 200 million individuals equals the output of 100,000 workers is inaccuracy². For one thing who runs and organizes 200 million people giving one hour? Will that also be volunteers providing an hour a head or fulltime staff, which means a paycheck. If it’s volunteer management then the first 20 minutes of their hour will be spent getting caught up on what’s going on and that last 20 bringing the next hour shift up to speed. That leaves them 20 minutes for planning and telling folks on their shift what to do. You have all the time of the workers spend being told what to do. Just think of how long it takes you to cook a meal in your kitchen vs. some else’s where you have to keep hunting for things. You have none of the specialized divisions of labor that give a Fortune 500 company its power. Think of how many man hours it takes a professional contractor to build a home vs. the number it takes Habitat for Humanity (and even at Habitat there are a lot of people who know what they are doing). No organization. No efficiency. No specialization of labor. No economy of scale.
But here’s the clincher. How will the efforts of 200,000,000 individuals hunting and pecking for one hour each compare to a years work from 100,000 accomplished writers?
Your idea is noble and mathematically your numbers are correct but all you will accomplished is souring your view of the world. You must not allow this theorem to seduce you into the false idea that is all just so gosh darn easy. Why all we have to do is snap our fingers, one measly hour and presto! everything’s fixed. The more you think it’s simple and easy the more you will become disappointed and resentful of the world around you when things are not being done as you see they should be. I think this is where a big part of the anger of the “angry” left comes from. From a belief that it’s all so simple, if people would only X then Y. But sadly it’s not simple. Everything is connected and touching everything else.
That is not to say we shouldn’t try. We should, but just remember to keep you head about it.
I think you took that point just way, way, too literally there, DS. Perhaps you need a break from the classroom. Certainly, with isolated bits of time being given by untrained people, a lot is lost in efficiency. My point is simply that small amounts of time given by many individuals can be a powerful force for social change, not that it's going to usher in instantaneous utopia.
However, my theoretical army of volunteers would still only be marginally more poorly trained than, say, the paid staff at Wal-Mart.
Okay. I ran past the goal and off the track and out of the stadium.
But if I may your crack on WalMart proves my point. Your amry will be on par with the guy stocking shevels, however do you think you army can match WalMart's managment and org structure? In Bentonville there are a lot of very highly trained people, people with advanced business degrees and years of experience, people making a lot of money and they pull the strings. Can you match that with an hour a year?
And on a completely unreated note I am stealing software on LimeWire now to build a wedding wed site for Helen. Whee!
Not to belabor the point, but realize that a lot of volunteers are highly trained in their areas of contribution is well. Just because there are amateurs pouring beer at Comfest doesn't mean that the Peace Corps deploys unskilled imbeciles. Just like the for-profit commercial world, there are many levels of volunteerism and many types of participant.
Congrats on your pilfered software.
While the Peace corp is well trained the required commitment to join them is slightly longer than one hour a year. As for your point that I should realize there are highly trained volunteers; yes, I know. That's why I wrote, "Think of how many man hours it takes a professional contractor to build a home vs. the number it takes Habitat for Humanity (and even at Habitat there are a lot of people who know what they are doing)"
My point is you Hour-o-Year army isn't capable of accomplishing any more than a tiny fraction of what a Fortune 500 company can, and that you shouldn't get down in the dumps when they don't.
I'm almost tired of bickering over these rather trivial differences, but: 1) I said one hour on average--meaning some people will do a week and many will do nothing; 2) It must be considered how much volunteer work is low-tech and low-skill compared to paid work. How much training does it require to ladel out soup at a soup kitchen? How much efficiency do you lose explaining to someone how to ring a bell for the Salvation Army? To stand around and collect signatures for something? To pour beer to raise money for the homeless (apparently a lot on the last one, actually, seeing how bad most of them suck at it)? No, low-hour volunteering won't put the fear of God into GM's organizational structure, but can provide a lot of basic services that otherwise might not be provided.
Now for my total off-topic: just finished watching (an annoyingly low-quality copy of) Hotel Rwanda. Perhaps we should watch movies instead of the news, as the film was a whole lot more effective a call to action than the NYT reciting mind-blowing but depersonalized body counts from the latest genocide that the world ignored.
I just burnt me a copy o Hotel Rwanda today. Probably have to wait until Helen's next trip to watch it.
Watched Sideways today. It was alright up until the end, when they wrecked the c900 convertible. I hate the movie and I hate them.
DS, I haven't seen Sideways yet, wanted too, until your spoiler. I don't want to see that car meet its maker!
I bagged several items, and stapled the USPS postcard to the bag, promoing the food drive Saturday morning. After the mail was delivered and the items remained, I brought the bag into work for a different charity. Too bad, but I can't believe a bag of food lasted on my porch for 8 hours - in Olde Towne East!!
Just goes to show you, Michael, how far Olde Town has come. Now if you'd have left a bag of crack and ammo. that probably would have been a different story altogether. I'm glad your donation found a home nonetheless. Even if it had been stolen, the effect would have been exactly the same (poor people getting food), so it really would have still been a good effort.
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