“i am sick and tired of cooking food for the homeless with witless frickin yuppies and watching suburbanite housewives bring salmon and lattes for only their favorite seniors during monday night bingo. oh the humanity! if i have to peel potatoes with one more marketing assistant or bag clothing with one more real estate developer in search of a tax break, well i don’t even want to imagine the consequences.”

“not that i want these people to go away, every lil bit helps. heck, i’m even ok with ralph lauren pimping volunteerism to denim-clad youth. but it would be nice to meet up with interesting people i might actually want to hang out with through volunteer work. people who don’t think they will be raped and pillaged every time they step into my neighborhood, people who respect that all old people — regardless of race, creed, or personal affection — deserve a latte or prune juice, whatever their preference and digestional ability.”

These are the musings of a 27-year-old Chicago woman from the bulletin board on the social networking web site Friendster. I kept the lower case to try and preserve the spirit of her original post. ITF’s blog postings tend to err on the side of well-thought-out cultural observations. Not such a horrible pit to fall into, I suppose, unless the lingua franca of the land is an off-the-cuff dialect shot through with socio-economic preconceptions.

Sometimes it pays to give an ear to some good old-fashioned ranting in its raw form. Instead of quarantining speech for perpetuating stereotypes or sketching an insightful history of power imbalance, what happens when we bite our tongues, strap ourselves to the mast and do our best to take something on its own terms?

Now, if I wanted to critique the above musings I’d go right for the jugular. The post’s basic fallacy is that while it chastises yuppies, suburbanite housewives, marketing assistants and real estate developers for being less than magnanimous in their volunteerism, our poster reveals a desire to use volunteering as a means towards socializing; surely not the classless, raceless, ageless, geographyless realm of pure volunteerism she seems to imagine.

Ok, that’s my knee-jerk reaction to idealistic, suburb-hating, 20-something hipsters. But what happens when I keep the knee under control and try not to be a jerk? When I listen to the hypocrisy embedded in her post, it says something rather clearly; as a result of its contradiction, not in spite of it. “I need no reward for my acts of goodness,” it seems to say, “but why does everybody else need to incentivize their volunteerism?” Perhaps the moral of the story is that we are blind to our own ideological structures and have 20/20 vision when it comes to the motivations of other groups? Perhaps there’s value, especially in the philanthropic community, of preserving that untarnished sense of benevolence.  

Benjamin Helphand