Volunteering Beats Voting

Helplessness. That's what I felt when Massachussetts Governor Bill Weld gerrymandered my hometown--Northampton--out of the 1st congressional district for the sole purpose of trying to get a Republican into Massachusetts' delegation. The summer after 10th grade, I had spent a month volunteering for the campaign of my congressman, John Olver, a retired UMass chemistry professor. I had attended his frenetic victory party, filled with hope for this system I had--or so I thought--learned to work within. Liberalism had its moment in the sun and I felt a part of it all.

Then, all of a sudden, my representative in Washington was whisked away from me, and slick-haired Richie Neal--a Democrat, yes, but no Olver--was now my representative. In spite of the hopeful fact that a new party was also on the brink of winning the presidency for the first time since I was almost too small to remember, Weld's move shook me. It was that easy for the governor to render months, even years, of grassroots organizing in Northampton--Olver's stronghold and home base--completely useless at the following election. While Weld's move didn't ultimately work (John Olver is currently US Representative in the 2nd congressional district), my faith in politics was damaged forever.

That helpless feeling has come back with a strange familiarity as I've watched Bob Dole tear through the Republican primaries. Dole, as I recall, was the guy to the right of Bush, the conservative we Democrats feared even more than Reagan's heir-apparent in '88. Dole might well be elected president, and there's not exactly anything I can personally do to combat that fact.

There's no doubt that we should all vote, of course. It's not such a big burden for energetic college students to fill out an absentee ballot or trudge over to the polls. But voting alone, particularly if it's for a losing cause, does not--for me at least--appease that feeling of hopelessness, of standing idly by and watching America go down the tubes. So what can we do during those 1,455 or so days when we're not voting? Work on a political campaign? Perhaps. But I think there are plenty of more direct ways of helping in the meantime, in that forgotten span of time between one set of PAC-and corporation-backed campaigns and ghost-written speeches and the next.

The other method involves actively becoming a part of the structure which the government refuses to implement. Plenty of people seem to care about certain policies more than enough to complain about who is in office on the basis of those policies. But relatively few complainers move much toward becoming human replacements for the dollars which a new budget has snatched--or will snatch--away from public programs and support structures. In my view, there are two kinds of political disillusionment--disillusionment accompanied by helplessness, which I came to know all too well and disillusionment accompanied by corrective action, even if only on a small scale, which I am glad to have been able to come to know better.

The wonderful thing about volunteer programs is that they offer anyone a chance to effect the same kind of change which might lead to convoluted political battles on a larger scale, while staying safely committed to nonpartisan common goals like providing adults with the skills they need to find employment themselves. Members of both political parties volunteer for PEN, Partners for Empowering Neighborhoods, a student group at Harvard devoted to adult education, empowering its adult students, many of whom are supporting families, with literacy and job skills. PEN is one of many volunteer organizations that benefit from some government funding. This year, for example, the HOPE 6 fund, an initiative devoted to taking on certain selected inner-city communities and pumping resources into them, is in part responsible for the success of our program at Mission Hill. But HOPE 6 is only money. Adult education classes are taught by people.

A vote is impersonal, any way you construe it. Its value should not be discounted, but the mob mentality is partly right in that a vote won't do much by itself. The mistake we must avoid is allowing helplessness to spawn from that trivial fact. A vote sits only on the fringe of your rights and privileges as an American. You have the right to vote, but you also have the right to volunteer and accomplish much more than your vote possibly could. A Republican administration might well eliminate HOPE 6. Will that negate the will of the hundreds of caring Boston and Cambridge residents (and, yes, lowly Harvard students) who take it upon themselves to help Mission Hill thrive as a community and to help its residents break out of the cycle of poverty and unemployment?

If HOPE 6 is scrapped--be it by Republicans or Democrats--we, as Americans, are fully capable of replacing every penny eliminated by Washington with a dollar of manpower through personal action in inner-city neighborhoods, through volunteer education and empowerment. You may stand on either side of the political spectrum. But regardless, your right--and privilege--to do your part to make America the kind of place you'd like it to be is not cut off with the funding.

It is not your obligation to back your vote with action, or to combat a political loss with a personal commitment to the people you thought your vote would help. But as much as you may whine about who's in office (and by all means you should whine if you feel that way), single mothers and immigrant families at Boston housing projects won't hear your--or my--complaints about gerrymandering or slick hair. They will hear us better, I think, if we--while learning ourselves from their own unique perspectives--offer to share our knowledge of the English language, or resume-writing, or basic computer skills, with them.

Robin Goldstein is the Administrative Director of Partners for Empowering Neighborhoods.