Politics at the Dinner Table, Please

In response to the post entitled “Being Politically ‘Correct’ Isn’t Always A Good Thing”, I agree that an issue of contention within our society today is our general unwillingness to discuss things that are controversial, or “politically incorrect”. In my opinion this disincentive to openly discuss issues that are affecting our society; such as race relations, abortion, sexuality and many other morally or socially “uncomfortable” topics, is degrading the quality and inevitably the effectiveness of discourse on the national level. When I began to think about this issue in correlation to our readings for this week, the possibility struck me that what Eliasoph and the other theorists of this week identify as the ineffectiveness of service and volunteer organizations to foster meaningful, politically applicable experiences could actually be actually the inability of volunteers to translate their knowledge and experience into meaningful discourse.

While the lessons one learns while working, for instance, in a soup kitchen can be personally and morally significant, in relation to democracy they are only important to the extent which the individual uses them for the public good. In this sense, volunteers may in fact learn a great deal about other sects within society or various problems within the nation, but they may not be able to, or comfortable with, conveying this knowledge in the public sphere (because of the cultural limits placed on rhetoric mentioned by my classmate). With this hypothesis in place, the “group meetings” referenced by Eliasoph, with their lack of verbal connection between volunteer work and broader issues, could have been caused by the participants' general lack of comfort concerning the issues that the service brought up within the community.

I, like my fellow classmate, believe that this is both a serious, and a deeply ingrained problem within our society. If it is true that people do not feel comfortable discussing what they take away from service or civic organizations, then I also have to agree with the theorists in their denouncement of these institutions. How can we foster greater, more open communication about controversial issues? There will most always be groups of people willing to bring these issues to the political forefront, but what about the everyday citizen? What about the suburban woman who volunteers in the inner city, but doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up about race or education issues because of her race, gender, or for whatever reason? This is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed if we expect volunteer organizations to effect real change through their participants.