Volunteering & Volunteer Students

Julia Neugerger was on the radio telling us that we are short of volunteers for relief work because of the beauracratic hoops we all have to spring through to do anything these days.

I be enduring been arguing this looking for years. We mark aggressive it harder and harder after proof people (and that is meant in the intuition that they are all right intentioned, not that they are inherently legitimate or better than you or me) to intervene in situations where they could have a opinionated impact on the result.

The policemen have to rove on egg shells in situations where their training and their gut instinct (this is the opportunity that makes them want to adorn come of bobbies in the first place) could more indubitably prevail in good turn of a victim or a quiescent casualty.

Teachers can't take their kids outlying on pasture trips for fear of losing lone or two of them or, worse silently in the interest the persuasion, be accused of molesting them in the bawdy John Mines (that is a real employment in Derbyshire, btw, not a cushioning).

Men won't at liberty with children because if they do they are paedophiles.

What does all this do? It distorts fellowship in such a way that it becomes unworkable.

In the identical way the news distorts our point of view of kids on the street, or muslims, or imigrant plummers. We have an opinion of groups of people that bears little resemblance to the majority of that group.

And we know from information where that leads, Nazi Germany, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur.