VOLUNTEERS

A volunteer is from my view somebody willing to participate in whatever just because they want to. Nobody forces them to participate they just do it for fun or some personal reason.

Of course there are all kinds of things for which you can volunteer. Some will require a cost of one kind or another, other’s just time.

And they range from helping out at a rescue mission, to giving blood and these days even joining the military. Which to me is taking the whole volunteer idea way beyond any point of reason because I don’t care how you choose to look at it getting killed it a lot more drastic price than I would want to pay for volunteering.

I think the one area of debate for me is in the area of the bible thumpers. I don’t personally regard those who volunteer in that arena to truly be volunteers. In my opinion they do it with full expectation of getting something in return. Oh they might be content to wait till they get to heaven for their reward, but the whole point is that there is a reward involved.

Am I criticizing that approach? Not at all. I think it is glorious. As a pastor you get advantage of all this free labor and don’t have to worry about things like payroll taxes or worker’s compensation. I call that being smart. And when you consider that if by some remote chance they were wrong about eternity, hey they sure can have a laugh at the people’s expense who volunteered.

I don’t want to discuss the afterlife though. I’m just expressing the idea here that inspiring people to the kinds of level that you might get from a church member without any promise of reward is to say the least totally challenging.

Which for me as a politician is even tougher because I can’t even claim God told me to do it. I have to come up with some lie to motivate people.

Finding the right button to push with some people is difficult in that regard. It is just hard at times to always know what will melt a person’s basic iceberg of resistance when it comes to not volunteering to do some kind of free labor for the city.

I do have a few choices though. For example patriotism works on some occasions. Waving the flag and other such forms of inspiration do help, especially around the Fourth of July. However I am hampered by the limitations of working for a city. That pretty much rules out things like speaking of national security.

Still in the right situations I have succeeded in getting enough suckers, er volunteers to capture a vision of civic duty. (That’s one of my pet phrases for sucking people dry of as much free labor as I can.) I won’t share some of my other forms of inspiration.

There is no sense giving away too many trade secrets that somebody else might try to use. I’ll just toss out that in my case I have had enough success at this that I haven’t had to pay to get my car washed for a long, long time!