Content provided in partnership with
Coming together in Fargo
Christian Century, July 30, 1997 by Stewart W. Herman
This divine economy is characterized by a spiraling logic of needs which impel response, and responses defined by need -- a logic which is alluring but relentless and even consuming. During the first few days of volunteering, for example, experienced how seductive was the call to set aside the tight network of ordinary obligations and lose myself in a steady series of imperative tasks. There was no end to the work I could do. But it soon became evident that such volunteering too easily upset the precarious balances between family, work and other commitments that I could not simply walk away from. An impossible stretch was required between two distinct worlds: the normal world of carefully crafted obligations and reciprocities, and a scary new world of losses and disruption, of giving and receiving.
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
When the flood temporarily swept aside the economy of social exchange, it unveiled the bottomless demands that need can make. Dangers lurk in the gift economy. For the recipient to live on gifts invites the erosion of self-respect. For the donor to live so attuned to human need is to invite exhaustion and burn-out, not only because need always exceeds the gifts available, but because an economy of needs and gifts resists the ordinary structures of predictability that make the dense interconnectedness of social life bearable. The gift economy, in short, may demand more than complex, interdependent human communities can sustain except for short bursts of unrestrained generosity in times of emergency . As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, gestures of agape are needed to reinvigorate the bonds of social mutuality, but a life lived out of God's agape is not an historical possibility.
It has been almost a decade since George Bush and other conservatives started arguing that volunteering citizens might deliver the services we could no longer afford from governmental bureaucracies. If the Fargo and Moorhead flood offers inspirational evidence for the latent power of gift-giving to strangers, it also offers resounding support for the indispensable role of government. The defense against the flood had to be planned and strategically coordinated weeks before it engaged the emotions of volunteers. Homeowners needed engineering measurements and advice on how to build dikes, and volunteers needed direction in their work. City officials demonstrated a shrewd foresight and cool-headed oversight, as well as a steady resolve to weather the roller-coasting emotions of city residents. There is a continuing need for such resilient planning, to strengthen city defense against the next flood.
The government is needed as a kind of flywheel for the wildly accelerating and decelerating needs and voluntaristic impulses that impinge upon the life of the community. Strategy, oversight or anything connected with the long term cannot be entrusted to the volatile energies of gift-giving. Three weeks after the crest, for example, the city of Moorhead organized a drive to remove tens of thousands of sodden sandbags. Two thousand volunteers were hoped for ; 150 signed up Saturday was not only a lovely spring days, but it happened to be the first day of the fishing season. The small turnout demonstrates how impoverished and chaotic the city would become if donated labor were the only resource available.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: News
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »