The other day I found myself listening to Rush Limbaugh. I've always enjoyed his program. I don't always agree with him, but I know why he's so popular. He's downright funny.
Rush was getting on a rant about Obama's commencement speech at Arizona State University. Obama was saying, "If you're a business major why not help a struggling non-profit improve its business model... If you're a nurse why not go into public health..."
According to Rush, Obama was telling everyone to go into non-profit work.
"Bloodsuckers," Rush said. "That's what the non-profit sector's filled with. Bloodsuckers." He went on to explain that if you got hit up as much as The Great El Maha Rushi, you'd think that all those non-profit folks were bloodsuckers.
No, Rush said. It was the producers that make the nation great. They make money that fuel the do-gooders' non-profits.
Boy did I get mad. I've never been angry from listening to Rush. Usually I get on my high horse with him. Laugh at all that liberal minutiae. But it really got to me.
Was I a bloodsucker? Was I wasting some talents that could better be used in the for-profit sector?
Before I get too far with this, don't worry. I'm not going to abandon my job as a professional Scouter to sell pharmaceuticals. But it really stuck in my craw, I have to admit.
My wife is on her seventh year teaching at an inner-city charter school in the District. My wife and I are poster children for the sort of stuff the Obamas keep on saying at all these commencements (although, I bet Obama would rather I worked for the Boys & Girls Club than the Boy Scouts--a subject for another blog post...).
We're going to Canada this next week with the kids from my wife's charter school. Every year, she takes kids to a French-speaking country. Every year it has been France, but this year it will be French-speaking Canada. We'll take a bunch of kids from across the Anacostia to the sugar shacks in Quebec.
There will be other stuff on this trip--we'll bike around Old Montreal, go ice skating--but this is the sort of thing I live for. I like to think that the sugar shacks of rural Canada are about as foreign as the streets of Paris or the villages of Paraguay to these kids from DC. It's the sort of wholly foreign landscape that a Scout from Burke might see on horseback in Philmont, New Mexico. And to be there when a young person's worldview changes radically--well, it's indescribable.
Maybe that's what's missing in Obama's charge and Rush's rant: There are a whole host of reasons to do this work--and most of it has nothing to do with sacrifice.
