Sing This All Together

Autumn’s earliest weeks are history (which, as a half-full glass kind of guy, means winter is closer now than it was this time last week, BUT the end of winter is also a week closer) and with major league baseball playoffs, high school, college and pro football all battling for our attention while the partisan unpleasantness in Washington DC (Disruptive Contention) continues, there's still the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other plod of daily life on this Big Blue Marble to which to attend.

And we're the ones who do it for-and sometimes, inadvertently (and other times maliciously) do it to one another. I tried earlier in the week, pretty much out of boredom, to count all the local elections going on across these fifty mostly United States this fall and gave up as the number was staggering.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't care or that we should become passive, on the contrary. The poet, Edward Everett Hale once offered, "I am only one, but still, I am one. I cannot do everything, but still, I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do." And he’s right.

Part of what makes this country this country and not somebody else’s is the tens of billions of hours of volunteer effort that we invest in making where we live a better place. You probably think I’m making that number up and maybe I am but maybe I’m not.

Go to the city’s website and check out the calendar of meetings and learn again how many of our neighbors are involved in the various advisories, boards, committees, and whatever they’re called this week that are holding meetings and do a rough calculation of the amount of time those meetings take (And don't forget to add the prep time and the follow-up time). How's that calculator doing now? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Bearing in mind, I’m not pretending to count all the school-related and/or neighborhood connected outreaches and informal projects that so many of us are engaged in as we find the time (or in my case the energy and enthusiasm).  As much as I’ve enjoyed my involvement on a lot of city citizen-panels, something I will ruefully concede that those also on those same panels might not be inclined to say, it’s never really been about whatever ‘the job’ has been but, rather, more the sense of shared community, the idea of hey-this-is-important-and-we-need-to-do it and the satisfaction that comes from trying that I find intoxicating and rewarding.

And no matter how much we do, there’s always more that needs to be done. For some of us, there's a band or after-school sports practice in need of a driver, and falling leaves that will not rake themselves-though how cool would that be if they did?

And there are a hundred other reasons for leaving all the lugging and heavy lifting to someone else, but I suspect Washington had better things to do a long time ago on a cold winter's night when someone said, 'there's a rowboat crossing the Delaware in ten minutes, George; be on it.' And just as there will always be another river to cross, let's hope it's always standing room only in the boat.
-bill kenny