September 19, 2005

Today, on this first day of orientation, all the volunteers, Russians and Americans alike, gathered in a meeting room at our Holiday Inn to hear a talk by a director at the Points of Light foundation. We were told, in measured, non-dramatic tones of the importance of our work, how the US-Russia Volunteer Initiatve was born at the 2000 Bush-Putin summit, and how significant volunteerism is in American history. At that point he began an empty and even misleading account of the volunteer in “our great land,” a phrase that his equally useless promotional video hoisted up. His opening rhetorical question sounded promising: “Who were the first people in America?” If this had just been a group of Americans, I would have been only bemused by his response, which followed Russian suggestions of “Columbus,” “the Spanish,” “entrepreneurs,” “Spanish,” etc, and was echoed on his first powerpoint slide:

The Origins of Volunteerism in the US

- The settlers and pioneers.

- Rugged Individualism

- Life on the plains

- Community

- Benjamin Franklin

…

Let’s pass over the little problem of “US” (which did not exist for centuries after the earliest European explorers landed) so we can get to some missing bullet points, no pun intended. Yes, I understand what your question should have been, Mr. Lighthead—who were the first Europeans in America? But in a “history of volunteerism,” and before an audience of United States neophytes, I would think that more care for details would be appropriate. Can you at least mention the natives, Mr. Pointy? Presumably they were some of the people that early American “volunteerism”—with its community spirit and “helped” out. And if so, I would have liked to hear your definition of volunteerism. Let’s pretend they were volunteers of a sort; but doesn’t their version of volunteerism (if such a thing can even jibe with the notion of “rugged individualism”) present a sharp contrast with ours? Doesn’t it teach us something about the importance of paying attention to the cultures which we seek to “help”? Doesn’t it present one of the biggest questions of first world humanitarian support: who gets to define what “help” means? Here’s the beef, but also, here’s the ideology. Here’s another, better way of life. That question is presumably answered by the liberal democratic system which we eagerly seek to export; and of course that exporting might sometimes end up bankrupting that idea to begin with. Isn’t that America’s foreign problem? How do you do good but not do harm? How do you help others? Perhaps by learning how not to help yourself simultaneously.

And this is to say nothing of his omission of the women’s and blacks’ suffrage movement (Jane Addams, Hull House, etc) the real beginning of American volunteerism (not without its own selfishness and problems of course), which eventually helped spawn the civil rights movement. I think it was less a history of volunteerism than a demonstration of old Soviet historiography. Na zdrovie!

Of course, I had to say something. Diplomatically of course.