Recast the language: collective, responsible

• responsibly: we contribute to the community as a matter of course, not as one of several optional ways to display of our wealth and virtue, and regardless of the prospects for getting a medal from Halliburton or a million hits on YouTube. Some people are terrified at the very thought of obligations to anyone but a private corporation. Commynism! they’ll shout. Yup: exactly as red as municipal hospitals, public schools, the highway system, and Social Security.

We already have a common phrase for what I’m talking about: “giving back to the community,” the acknowledgement that we owe most of the good things in our lives to what we’ve built as a community, not to what we can charge at WalMart. Logically, then, we won’t have much if we don’t contribute. That means all of us. Instead of year-end praise rituals for heroic effort by a few unusually generous individuals, we might simply expect to be able to count on help from one another; consistently shared responsibility rather than exceptional sacrifice. Of course many many people contribute every day. But we talk about them with great astonishment, as if they are rare, wispy creatures of fable instead of the steady beating heart of our communities.

So while we're at it, let's take the time to name the contributions we make already to our communities, whether it be coaching Little League, donating blood, establishing some legal protections for the local wetlands, or running petition drives to Throw the Bums Out. These may or may not reveal what folks see as the most serious issues, but they do show what kind of people we want to be. I think it's also important to acknowledge, that despite the crises we face, many people still feel pretty good about their communities.

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“Social justice needs to be related to rational self-interest, not posed and pursued as an abstract ideal. But I had thought that justice was one thing and self-interest another-- that they didn’t need to be, because they couldn’t be, reconciled. I made some sacrifices, but in the main line of what I did, my pursuit of justice got reconciled with my self-interest behind my back. Justice and self-interest are sometimes, even often, opposed, but when you renounce the need to reconcile them, you cannot help but engage in bad faith. Self-righteousness almost always has a hidden agenda. Mine did” (Metzgar 198).
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Might be interesting to initiate conversations among professional groups, about our responsibility to the larger community. It's widely taken for granted that teachers and health care workers, for instance, are supposed to serve the good of the community. Very seldom, however, are we expected to advocate for our students and patients in front of policy makers. Yet we know education and health outcomes depend very much on what goes on outside our schools and clinics. What about cops, architects, engineers? Could we as professionals expand our notions of service and responsibility?