"Indeed, the best responses to many of our society's ills may be local and decentralized, drawing on such spiritual virtues as love, generosity, a willingness to listen, and the capacity to see a divine spark in even the most desperate and self-destructive of our fellow human beings...But as Loeb points out, the impact of individual action and service is limited without considering the bigger picture:
[But] To rely on volunteer efforts is to duck the basic issue of common responsibility, and to ignore the fact that individual crises often result from collective forces."
I've seen too many compassionate individuals trying to stem rivers of need, while national political and economic leaders have opened the floodgates to widen them. We build five houses with Habitat for Humanity, while escalating rents and government cutbacks throw a hundred families into the street. We laboriously restore a single stream while a timber company clear-cuts a watershed or global climate change turns once-fertile agricultural land into desert. As the late Reverend William Sloane Coffin once said, "Charity must not be allowed to go bail for justice."Whats important is understanding the root cause of societal issues and how individual actions can be maximized to address and change that. This means linking individual actions towards achieving structural solutions.
But unfortunately individual volunteerism and acts of charity is so often lionized in the media and in politics rather than citizen political engagement and collective action to achieve structural change as a solution to societal problems. The most obvious example of this is Martin Luther King jr. whose radical legacy of challenging powerful forces in American society has been thoroughly sanitized and replaced by the media as a non-confrontational "black Santa Claus" . This has been further institutionalized by our government by making the observed federal holiday of MLK Jr. Day a "Day of Service" of promoting individual volunteerism in honor of his memory.
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