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...The records of these probation programs are astonishingly good, but there are not enough dollars in the Treasury to hire enough counselorsor enough surrogate fathers-to work with all the children who need help...

...It is no accident that the United Way and the Red Cross organize their drives in offices, and that is where the Big Brothers and other similar groups should also concentrate...

...The hats were just as good as they used to be, but it was no longer smart to wear them...

...The Great Society was not a “success,” in the way that World War 11, going to the moon, and the Cuban missile crisis, had been successes, so it joined the Vietnam war and the Bay of Pigs in the short list of American “failures...

...He had been teaching Sunday school for years, an effort which, by even the most cold-blooded estimate, could win only a limited number of votes...

...The talk on college campuses is of business school and law boards, not of teaching poor children or helping the sick...

...There are times in life, especially the late teens and early twenties, when a brief diversion from the world of school and work is not only tolerable but also quite welcome...

...So far we have not heard it, except, in muted fashion, in the requests to turn down the thermostats...

...Everyone Would Notice But these conditions can be changed, as the Parable of the Hats suggests...

...Francis were in your lineup of role models, along with Elvis and Willie Mays...

...Nothing works out as planned any more...

...But there is a secret most parents share about where “flexibility” and “freedom” lead...

...A judge in the state of Washington had decided that he could put prisoners to more useful ends than simply sitting in jail...

...Unattached men and women think, with gratitude, of their freedom to experiment, which marriage would deny them...

...If the excess of the 1960s was in the direction of sincerity and engagement in the lives of others, the excess of our time is its cynical, narcissistic concentration on Maximum Personal Fulfillment...

...If “altruism” suggests only the Albert Schweitzers and the Dorothy Days, only a handful of disciples will take the pledge...

...And everyone would notice if you did...

...From the vantage point of 50, it is easy to see that anyone can spare a few years in the early twenties...

...Francis as your role model, you could choose Joe Califano and look forward, as your rightful due, to spells of lucrative law practice between bouts of serving mankind at $47,500 a year...

...the medical system, where volunteers could provide boththe compassion and the simple care that doctors and nurses are too busy to give...

...This is one area where the press, guardian of our morals, could do as much for morality as it...

...A man in a certain position would no more neglect to wear his hat when he went outside than he would forget his shoes...

...You may be running your sporting goods shop on the sharpest of business principles, but you also help out with the Boy Scout troop, contribute to the church, and participate in Lions Club projects to help the blind...

...A hermit can’t go to a singles bar, but a child of this generation can, safe in the knowledge that through all his tomorrows he will be free to keep doing his own thing...

...16 Waiting for the Call But there is another class of people, with different motives...

...I believe no one should have children unless they’re wanted...

...I am concerned, instead, with their translation into specific actions...

...In 1977, helping one’s fellow man seems an appropriate outlet only for the nien behind bars...

...This sort of thing can be overdone, as anyone who has read small-town papers knows, but if the national press raised its coverage of altruistic efforts from one per cent of the total coverage to three, it could turn the tide...

...But then fashion changed-on January 20, 1961, to be precise-when John Kennedy wordlessly connected hats with the stuffy, vigor-less men of the past...

...Young fashionable couples share a smirk of condescension when they pass contemporaries burdened with children...

...With the passing of the draft, military service has become a purely commercial affair, rather than the matter of shared obligation it ought to be...

...But the age of economic innocence has been lost, and with it the spacious sense of time that let young people squander it on a1 truism...

...The inbred jadedness of every newsman makes him --and me-wince at the suggestion, but the more that good works are publicized by the press, the more people will find a reason to do them...

...Or we can hope for another alternative: that somehow the climate will change...

...Whatever his other pluses and minuses, Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out first and best the moment when this attitude changed...

...But what is the result...

...What they need is individual, one-to-one instruction, in which coaching, patience, discipline, and high standards can make them prosper...

...I do not like to think what it would be like to deal with an 10 institution that knows it can outwait you...

...Caring for the aged is the starkest example of the practical need for altruistic service...

...Those 1,100 D. C. psychiatrists should be donating some of their time, too...

...You might not be any purer in heart by the time you had trooped in with your classmates with a gift of canned goods for the poor at Christmas, filled the collection box for the overseas mission, and worked in youth groups at the hospital, but you certainly were accustomed to thinking that those efforts were part of normal life...

...Someone must do these jobs for us when we can no longer do them ourselves-jobs as genteel as reading from Homer, jobs as earthbound as cleaning our soiled beds...

...But at work your eyes are on others, and theirs on you...

...In most small towns and established urban neighborhoods, volunteer projects are still a part of normal adult life, whether through the Rotary, the B’nai B’rith, the Jaycees, or the church...

...hence weke buying services from a few people that we ought to be getting practically free from many...

...Like other kinds of arrogance, this had one thing in its favor, which was that it kept people from being pressured into doing what they did not choose to do...

...Group pressure, rather than spiritual nobility, may be the reason you are doing those things-but at least you are doing them...

...The Great Society also dampened altruism in another, and slightly contradictory, way...

...That’s a shame, because we need to do more than that-and can, if Carter will ask...

...To judge from the statistics, some of the economic pressure is off now-especially for those who are well prepared in a field such as business administration...

...We’ve been waiting since then for the call, which by office and by personality Carter is suited to give...

...I am not talking about simple feelings of good will toward one’s neighbor...

...Much like the ability to sit still in a pew for an hour, this seemed to be a talent that would serve you well in adult life...

...Our nation is in practical trouble without more altruism, and without it we are hollow as humarl beings...

...of the 1 psychiatrists practicing in Washin D.C., not one volunteers as much as an hour each week to work in the community health centers, and only three have offices in the needier Northeast and Southeast quarters of town...

...If you are a respectable citizen of a small town, you follow the respectable pattern...

...This is not a question of “big government” versus “free enterprise” or “private” versus “public” sector...

...They finished the process, which began in the New Deal, of making people think that helping others was the government’s job, and not a task for individual volunteers...

...America was changing, he said, from the world of the frontier to the world of Flaubert-from an age, that is, of opportunity for all who choose to take it, to a society in which overtrained aspirants search the obituary page each morning to see what positions in government, business, academia, and the arts have just opened up...

...The Peace Corps is less than half the size it was in the mid-sixties...

...But I found it depressing for what it says about the idea of voluntary service...

...The battle to increase altruism, then, is in part the battle to make it more fashionable and better noticed...

...In the suburbs of New York or L. A. you may have no idea whether your next-door neighbor is an ax murderer or Bobby Fischer, and your neighbor knows as little about you...

...Why tutor a black child in reading if that only reduces the pressure for better schools...

...The point should already be clear: without more efforts of the sort I call altruistic, our society will be depressingly close to the Soviet caricature of it...

...This is the temper of the times, and I think we have to try to change it...

...but they know that the balls are the local social arbiters, and that people will notice if they don’t go...

...Instead of serving their time in prisons they could serve it in the outside world, if they agreed to perform socially useful tasks in nursing homes, mental hospitals, nurseries, schools, and the like...

...For teenagers, the best target of attack is the high school, where peer pressure is more intense than anywhere on earth except China...

...But I know for a fact, as any parent does, that this “altmistic” love is part of being fully human, and that we need more of it now...

...In altruism, as in hats, it’s a question of changing fashion and making people notice...

...The same is true of some probation programs...

...It is all a question of leadership, for leaders have the power to issue the call...

...These days, we are judged by our attitudes, not our acts...

...The second premise, a modification of the first, is that altruistic efforts should not be a monopoly of the young...

...But no school district in the country can afford that kind of help...

...It is, instead, a question of which services must be bought, either by government or individuals, and which will be given...

...I often go by one such establishment in my neighborhood, where, when the weather is fine, old ladies and gentlemen sit in their wheelchairs outside...

...Even if these mammoth efforts did not succeed, their scale so dwarfed that of private charities that they made the charities seem somewhat pathetic...

...Let me give some examples: Dollars in the Treasury Volunteer groups like the Big Brothers are designed to fight one of the causes of crime: children growing up without a father...

...None of us can be sure that we will not need help like that, but if our families cannot give it, we must go to the institutions...

...The fourth reason is that no one likes to be a sucker, least of all the young, and voluntary efforts have begun to look like a sucker’s game...

...Anyone who had a family had a place to go...

...Of course there are times when flexibility is better than commitment...

...Houses are too small, independence too cherished, the failings of old age too foreign to the life of the nuclear family for many generatiohs to stay under one roof...

...the other is that your behavior is always noticed...

...The young people of the sixties had problems peculiar to that era, but they also had its wonderful blessingthe gift of economic arrogance...

...There are many people in this country who are on the lookout for deeds to do, who have been looking for years...

...I know the way other institutions-schools, armies, hospitals, governments-treat you when you are fully able to cope and complain...

...Those who have raised children know that it complicates their lives and compromises their choices in the most drastic way...

...That is the power that this President, in particular, should possess...

...Many communities feel strangled by the rising cost of education, but many children- especially the poor onesnever learn how to read...

...The easiest way to reach that proportion might be for young people to put in a year or two of full-time service before they begin their working lives...

...Whenever even the shadow of an opportunity comes along-as it does in presidential elections, when each side convinces itself that the future of freedom is at stake-they throw themselves into the effort, happy that at last they are doing something worthwhile...

...His promise at that point was to make it fashionable once again to help and serve...

...That’s why the press should do more...

...Instead of a handful of saints, we need many millions of people who will contribute modest, regular amounts of service along the way...

...As part of the “Me” generation, spouses and children have also fallen from fashion...

...The standard of a tithe-which most churches preach and the Mormons enforce-may be too high for practical purposes, but even half of that, one twentieth of our time and energy, would make a tremendous difference...

...That is the genius of The New York Times in publishing the list of donors to its One Hundred Neediest Cases, and of small-town papers in running pictures of local good workers...

...This is not the case for us, here, now...

...The third reason for the waning of altruism was the early seventies’ addition to the Conventional Wisdomnamely, that the Great Society and foreign aid had both “failed...

...In big cities, another secret of success is to concentrate on the workplace, for that is the in-town equivalent of the fishbawl life of the small community...

...Few of those who attend could tell you precisely what charity is receiving their money...

...Most of us rarely go out of our way to look for good deeds that need doing, but if good deeds are pointed out to us we’ll usually pitch in-especially if we think we’re being watched...

...What’s more, helping people through the government had distinct advantages over the old approach...

...Costs have risen so fast that even the tenderest children half-hope that their parents will not survive long in institutional care, but the costs can’t possibly rise far enough to pay for all the services that we need...

...I may be a tax lawyer, but I am a member of Amnesty International and the Coalition to Save the Whales...

...In this world pregnancy is bad news, abortion far more thinkable than adoption...

...Our only hope is to live in a climate where those who are younger and healthier volunteer that help-to live, that is, in a climate of altruism...

...The mixture of motives may vary: for the lady teaching Sunday school, it may be nine parts good-heartedness and one part the knowledge that others will notice, while for her husband serving as an usher in church the proportions may be reversed...

...These features of small-town life bring us to the third premise: that the way to get more altruistic service is to build it into the structure of selfinterest and success, and to make sure that other people will notice whether or not you are pulling your load...

...I say “cynical” because, in its assumption that all efforts are equally futile, this outlook detaches us from any sense of responsibility for even trying...

...Not free from society altogether, like a hermit-only free of the permanent bonds, responsibilities, and compromises...

...there are certainly families that have been ruined by marriage and children too soon...

...If we are to have them, we must give them to ourselves...

...I am no propagandist for marriage...

...it’s not just the kids...

...Jesus and St...

...limited opportunities were a relic of a bygone age...

...That leaves the institutionsas harmlessly hedonistic as the sun-and-fun retirement communities, as harsh as the homes for the terminally ill, but all of them institutions, run on economic principles, compelled to make the most efficient use of each doctor, nurse, and orderly they employ...

...No one was quicker to point out these deceptions than the young people of the left, who suspected that altruistic efforts would only prop up the hated system...

...Modest, Regular Amounts The fiist is that this should not be considered an onerous burden or a lifetime task...

...Beyond these four reasons there is a fifth, which takes us to the heart of the spiritual sickness of the times...

...They work on the theory that there are certain times in a child’s life when personal attention, friendship, example, and discipline can make all the difference...

...Perhaps when our time comes there will be a different spirit, of the kind now found in many small communities and the old, stable neighborhoods of our cities, where young people count it part of their duty to spend time with the old, where families volunteer to help old people with the dozens of practical problems they confront each day...

...Consider the earnest environmentalist, who hauls his cans and bottles to the recycling center with quiet zeal...

...But both are doing something, and there is nothing shameful about good works that are solidly grounded in self-interest...

...the disabled, an enormous community which needs help to travel, read, and be trained for jobs, as well as needing companionship...

...Ye have the poor always with you,” Jesus had said, and the failure of the Great Society confirmed Jesus on this point...

...Two features distinguish the small towns and the old, stable, usually ethnic neighborhoods of big cities, where altruism is still strong, from the faceless portions of the big cities, where it is not...

...The only way to do it is to have many more people follow the example of the Big Brothers, volunteering their time to help others...

...12 It had the rare effect of granting young people the same perspective on the cycles of their lives that their elders had...

...One more example: the schools...

...if they get teenagers right after their first, non-violent offense, they can usually keep them from a second and third...

...The only way to get it is through volunteer tutors, who would act as a complement to teachers, rather than a substitute...

...What can my profession matter so long as my meat is nitrite-free...

...Your Line-up of Role Modds From the barn-raising to the wagon-train, given services were a symbol of pioneer America...

...This theory makes the child something of a pawn, but it does establish that you are not a man to be trifled with...

...We hear each week that a generation of illiterates is on the way, and the most practical way to save ourselves from it is through the efforts of volunteers...

...They are waiting for no more than the opportunity and the call...

...This is what Tom Wolfe calls “The ‘Me’ Generation,” and it leaves no time for altruism...

...Extended families would have gotten in the way of that plan, but they were shed long ago...

...Everyone would The Washington Monthly/October 1977 notice if he did...

...Week after week, children learned what qualities made a Samaritan “good,” and the priest and the Levite bad...

...If we don’t have that kind of money, we can instead hope for death before dependence...

...Why is there so little of that spirit available now...

...If their enthusiasm is misdirected, they can become Brown Shirts...

...With the right combination, altruism can become as popular as hats used to be...

...But there is an answer in these cases, and that is altruism...

...Young people in particular are susceptible to these1 idealistic calls -and to jadedness when the call does not come...

...Old age could not be prevented, but loneliness could...

...But there is nothing now that compares, as an item to announce at class reunions, to medical school, the law review, or a job with The New York Times...

...Usually it is the 14 most satisfying kind of love the parents have ever experienced, selfless love, of the sort that there can never be too much of in the world...

...If, at age 20, you thought that the question of your worldly success was only a matter of when and how but not if, you could share the same luxurious view of your own time...

...And, if any confirmation were needed for the acuity of your vision, did not Richard Nixon make “voluntarism” his watchword when he dismantled the OEO...

...Back in 1970 he delivered a commencement speech in which he warned the unsuspecting students that the previous rules of the game had been declared invalid...

...I want to suggest three premises for making altruism more practical...

...One is that altruistic “public service” is part of the normal burden of success and respectability...

...It can help both those who serve and those who are served, not to mention relieving the strain on the prisons...

...For most Americans, these steps will be effective...

...Another example is the military...

...We can increase it, not through another baby boom or by outlawing cohabitation, but by making voluntary, altruistic efforts a regular part of our national life...

...But for quite a while now it has been a reservoir without outlet...

...At the cost of great inconvenience, he manages to save dozens of bottles each month-while the manufacturers pour out millions more...

...This was the reservoir that the Peace Corps tapped-and the civil rights movement...

...From the rational point of view, this is obviously a good idea...

...The question was not whether you would be able to make a living, but at what point and on what terms you would choose to lend your talents to the working world...

...Maybe we do not need to revive the draft, but at the minimum we need to recall the spirit that all of us have a share in this burden, not simply the lower class...

...And “narcissistic” because, if Americans were once mocked for their passion to be free of germs, our passion now is to be free of the entanglements of human society...

...Why should anyone bother tutoring a child in the city or fighting malaria in the Peace Corps, if the cream of the current hard-headed thinkers told you that it was all a waste of time...

...The simplest way to put the practical problem is this: many of the things we need as a nation we can never afford to buy...

...To them, the “Depression” was something their parents worried about...

...Money is short, the kids are sick, and the house looks like hell...

...Whether their motives have been noble or base, there have been times and places and cultures in which people felt compelled to devote part of their time to the service of others...

...Such a system would be possible only if adults demonstrated that they believed in altruism for themselves, too, and not merely for their young sons...

...The,list could go on: the national parks’and forests, which need repair work but can’t afford it at constructionunion rates...

...Consider the example that none of us can easily rule out: the prospect of an institutionalized old age...

...The Jerry Lewis telethon is Hollywood~s answer to the charity ball: nine-tenths of the stars who give their all for Jerry’s kids might not be able to distinguish muscular dystrophy from a case of the flu, but they’re noticed on the show, and being invited proves they’re stars...

...The second reason is the obvious economic one-the 20th-century equivalent of the closing of the frontier...

...It is symbolic of other areas, such as the military or the medical system, in which soaring cost and insufficient service leave us feeling that there is no way out...

...but if wise leaders build on it and direct it, it can create the Peace Corps and the CCC...

...If we believe that this, like other forms of service, is a burden we all should share, we have to take another look at the volunteer army...

...Joseph WilkeS is a pseudonym...

...Masturbation” is another way to describe this attitude, and it is an equally loving act...

...This is to be a polemic about altruism and voluntary service, and I want to define those terms with care...

...Now even the declining ranks of those who have children, nephews, and abundant kin are not sure there will be a place for them...

...The government itself has never been very skillful at determining which of these well-meaning efforts helped its clients surprise that the public view is even less subtle...

...He still has the moral authority to do it, and his authority will grow if he dares to use it...

...Not many years ago, a hat was a basic element in the wardrobe of success...

...These, after all, are the people who tell us what is “sane...

...In an earlier generation, we might have relied on the comforting knowledge that, when we grew dependent, it would be on our children that we would depend-and if not them, on our brother’s children, our nieces and nephews, or some other branch of the extended family...

...By extension, this came to embrace the whole of the non-industrial sector, so that you could feel you’d fulfilled your altruistic duty by taking a job with The Washington Post...

...does by chasing Bert Lance...

...And you know that everyone will notice if you stop...

...The first reason is the decline of religion...

...VISTA, too, is withering on the vine...

...Half a generation ago, college students lined up to teach school in Appalachia or raise chickens in Tanganyika...

...Of course, there are alternatives...

...The words “draft” and “altruism” may look strange when juxtaposed, but a fair system of compulsory military service, like that of most Western European nations, would demonstrate our belief that someone besides the poor has a responsibility to serve...

...The Jimmy Carter we all saw a year and a half ago was raised in the culture that considers service a natural part of life...

...He was a fool to think his efforts mattered...

...We can be rich enough to hire all the help we need-people to cook our meals, take us shopping, help us dress and get around, take us to the library, and, not least, simply talk...

...In New York, San Francisco, and many other big cities, the “charity ball” has somehow become the social event of the season...

...The Soviets’ only mistake is in thinking that our failings are purely those of the capitalist system...

...It leaves no time for anything, in fact, that gets in the way of the main goal-which is to learn the perfect backhand, have the perfect sex life, take the perfect trip to Europe, and go to law school at night...

...Instead of choosing St...

...Those poor bastards have really gotten in a jam...

...if it is ridiculed, they can become members of the gangs, trying only to kill time...

...In a get-ahead world like this, voluntary service might still be attractive if it looked like a step up the ladder-as the Peace Corps did during the first Kennedy years...

...Even apart from whatever spiritual uplift they provided, the churches also got people in the habit of altruistic service...

...For most people, the power of the press is never so dramatic as when it is the power to put their names in print...

...Big cities fall short of these standards, because neither condition prevails: service is not part of success, and no one would notice anyway...

...I do not want to join them when I am their age...