From my heart, or from my mind?

I recently attended a Community Service Center, whose name I will not mention, and did my share of making the world a better place to live. Alright I will pause here for a second. Although I consider myself a decent human being, I am not the kind that cares about trees and the bees. I am more realistic kind of person and believe that community service should be completely voluntary and should come from the heart in order to make a difference in life.
So, do you think that I got up at seven thirty on the first chilly Saturday morning, right before final week just because I love working for the community? Yes, I think we are going to agree on this question. My community service was required in order to pass my University 101 class, and the class was required in order to graduate. So I guess I had no choice, but to be a philanthropic human being and serve my duty. When I was told we are going to the retirement center, I thought that we are going to serve them lunch, sit in some cozy and warm room and chat or play cards with the elder people and make their day a little bit nicer. Well I was wrong! When we got there we found out that the organizations from the retirement center actually wanted us to rake the leaves of the front yard and back yard and put them in bags. I do not want to sound like some coldhearted person, but aside from the fact that it was early in the morning it was 36 degrees and the yards were huge! We hardly finished the front yard and we had over 50 bags. One kid’s arm even started to bleed. I bet he felt satisfied with his service! After we finished with the front yard, we had to serve lunch to the elder people, which I was completely fine with. After serving for a while in a restaurant, I did not revolt anymore from touching strangers’ food or dishes. Doing their silverware is a whole different story! If there are any body fluids involved, you can not blame for being disgusted. Well the kitchen chef did make me do it after all, but there was a kid putting the dishes in the dishwasher; another one burned his hand taking them out of there and I saw a guy scrubbing the dirty plates, so I guess I got away pretty easy.
My community service experience was helpful after all. I started thinking of all the good things that service provides and how much more could have been done. So I started thinking about the people who participate in community service and their motivations to do so. I could not help but wonder; do we like to think of ourselves as better human beings than we actually are? Do we in fact like to help each other or do we want others to think that we are caring? I do not think that people who voluntary community service do it because they like to wash dishes. There are only two reasons that motivate them; because they want to make somebody’s life easier and better or because it will look better on their resume and job applications.
Society restricts our freedom of choosing to do community service by making it a recruitment of well rounded personality. All my friends included a list of voluntary work in their college applications. All of the sudden they all started to work for Red Cross in their senior year of high school. The government always starts to worry about injured and poor right before elections!
While raking the leaves I was listening around to other people’s conversations and there was one sentence that repeated in almost every single one of them: “I hope they will run out of bags finally”. So I guess I am not the only one who felt forced to clean somebody’s back yard. I would bet that 90% of the students who did community service this year would have not done it unless it was required. I guess this is the point of it being mandatory. Will forcing people to do good though, improve them as humans because they did something helpful to others, or will it make them worse because they did not want to?
I think that the public opinion forces people to act as they cared of the well being of the word. And doing something good because you feel obligated to would not make any difference. If people really did care they would use public transportation to save the Ozone layer. They would use less perfume. People would buy hybrid cars and actually use the hybrid option instead of pumping them up with gas. Years ago scientist invented a cheaper and less harmful substitutions of gas, but they never really came to the market because it would harm somebody’s wallet. If people really cared they would stop cutting down forests and recycle all the paper we already have in our homes. Instead of taking care of the world we live in, we wait for disasters to happen and then donate money to show that we are philanthropic. In the county I was born, there is a saying that “most of the good done in the world is done to hide something bad that has already been done.
Have you read one of those articles about a new governor, big movie star of a singer that recently donated some huge amount of money to the poor children in Africa? I have always wondered how there have never been articles, written about some normal people that donated money. These articles remind me of the movie “Ocean’s thirteen” and the interview of Terry Benedictd /Andy Garcia/ in Oprah’s show after the rest of the band had donated their money without his permission.
Lets be honest, there is this public opinion that drives people to do good things. I am not saying that there are no good people out there who would sacrifice their own well-being in the name of the common good. I just think that the majority of the people are a little bit selfish and are driven by some unstated society rules rather then their own soul. May be if the society did not make people feel obligated to help, they would act more like humans less like actors.