MOLI VIEW™

I spent most of the holiday season cleaning out my house and carting bags of clothes, books, and CDs to the local library and to a local thrift store run by a charity. I am always embarrassed when the people receiving these "donations" thank me; they're doing me a favor by taking junk off my hands. I get to be the "do-gooder" here because there are too many people in our country who don't have jobs or whose jobs don't pay enough for them to throw their money away on stuff they don't need, like I do.

I thoroughly enjoy all the volunteer work I do — that's why I do it — but I can't help being nagged by the sense that the do-gooder glow I get is, well, if not undeserved, then at least unfair. It's hard for me to think of a voluntary act that would be necessary if we lived in an equitable society where everyone had a decent income and home, a solid education, and health care. I'm not talking socialism here, just a well-organized society where the needs of the most vulnerable are met as a matter of course.

All this was stirred up again last night as I watched the speeches of the leading candidates coming out of the Iowa caucuses. There was John Edwards getting all fired up about the lack of health care, a living wage, shelter, and food for so many Americans.

"Why?" he asked with his Southern twang. "Why?"

Well, first of all because of Ronald Reagan, who was the most affable and thorough-going president to go about undoing the protections for vulnerable Americans put in place by FDR's New Deal. Roll back welfare! Empty the mental health facilities!

Second, there was the first President Bush, with his gruesome "thousand points of light" bestowing a lovely metaphor on the bad news that from now on the government was going to be out of the business of human services and taking care of each other was going to be a strictly volunteer effort.

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