I recently got a blast e-mail from the Obama campaign. I immediately wondered what I was going to be asked to do: Donate to the Franken campaign? Make calls for Jim Martin down in Georgia?
It turned out to be neither. The campaign was letting me know that barackobama.com was directing visitors to volunteer for -- or donate to -- relief efforts to aid the victims of the Southern California fires.
"Throughout the campaign," said the e-mail, "we saw time and again that when ordinary people act together, they can make a huge difference."
Obama's high-tech outreach has been instrumental in getting people across the country to donate millions of dollars and contribute millions of hours working on the campaign. Will it now become a hub for civic action?
Obama has always said that a call to service would be "a central cause" of his presidency. "We will ask Americans to serve," he said in a signature speech in July. "We will create new opportunities for Americans to serve. And we will direct that service to our most pressing challenges."
Clearly, those challenges have never been more pressing in our lifetime. As unemployment hits a 14-year high -- and heading higher -- layoffs mount, foreclosures stack up, and local governments throughout America gird themselves
for a coming wave of service cutbacks and hospital closures, we have metaphorical fires burning all across the country. Fires that threaten to turn into a social conflagration.
In the past, Americans could look to the safety net of social programs put in place by FDR during the Great Depression to mitigate the effects of an economic downturn. But, as Steven Greenhouse documented in the New York Times, the U.S. has become a "far different place" since the recession of the early '80s: Unemployment insurance is less generous, welfare has been scaled back, as have job training and housing programs.
These holes in the social safety net make a commitment to service even more urgent. This is a moment where it isn't enough to look to the government; it's a moment where we need to look to each other -- and to ourselves.
Obama clearly understands this. "In America," he has said, "each of us is free to seek our own dreams, but we must also serve a common purpose, a higher purpose. . . . Because, when it comes to the challenges we face, the American people are not the problem -- they are the answer."
This statement speaks volumes about Obama's belief that "government depends not just on the consent of the governed, but on the service of citizens."
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