Can You Spare a Moment for The....

~~This post should not be construed to mean that the organizations mentioned do not do important work. Rather it is a commentary about the poor working conditions and negative message that is sent by their tactics.

If I may go off topic from baseball for a bit....it is summertime in DC which means that the public advocacy groups have hired their yearly batch of idealist college students to canvas the city to raise money for a number of causes, be it the environment, Darfur, torture you name it. Every day a DCist can expect the hum of "can you spare a moment for the...(pick your cause)" to be louder than the cicadas that haunt our ears every 17 years. Now don't get me wrong, I am a liberal, an environmentalist, and I am against the genocide in Darfur and the torture of terror suspects. What bothers me however is that these poor college kids who have their hearts in the right place are preforming nothing less than slave labor for the benefit of organizations who accomplish very little other than to make us feel guilty for not stopping taking a moment for the environment. Granted, that automatically makes me a terrible person because it shouldn't annoy me that people are doing this for the general good of society. And of course it isn't always the case that every advocacy group actually accomplishes very little. But honestly lets face it, we could all do without the disapproving looks of John and Jane college kid. Here are some of the worst offenders that I have come across in my travels, not just in DC, but from personal first hand experience when I myself tried to take a "summer job for the environment."

Sierra Club - I actually worked one of these positions for a while and it was horrible. Every night after I finished my day job I would be loaded into a van and dropped off in a neighborhood where it was my goal to sell as many subscriptions as I could door to door. At the end of the night you would take a small percentage of the subscriptions as your pay for the day. Trust me, there was no way I was going to make even close to the $3,000 per summer that was advertised and I consider myself to be a good sales man. Now I know that the Sierra Club cares about the environment, but aside from being underpaid the poor kids that take these jobs are also (at least in my experience) unappreciated and mostly unwelcome by the people they talk to. To me it seems like you can't save the environment unless you have people that want to believe in what your organization is doing. Trust me, a few weeks with the Sierra Club would make even the most ardent environmentalist question if this is right for them.

State Level PIRG Operations - Where I went to college in Western Massachusetts MassPIRG was where it was at. Everyone who cared about the environment wanted to be a part of it. The problem was that it was completely left in the hands of students who again, had their hearts in the right place, but had no idea what they were doing. The only accomplishment that I ever heard about MassPIRG achieving while I was there was the closure of a grandfathered and polluting power plant years before. Everything else I heard about them involved internal strife, poor working conditions, and hastily elected officers who were there more to pad their resumes than to save the planet. To this day when I see someone working for US PIRG I can not take the organization seriously after witnessing what it allows its local branches to do.

Greenpeace - Nothing gets me more angry than Greenpeace. Especially because I think that the world needs an organization that takes strong action and drastic measures to make its point. But what I don't like is that they break the law and often times hurt innocent people. This gives the entire movement a bad image and paints a picture that all environmentalist are living in trees and shooting at loggers. Its a shame, if only we could find some happy medium.

Aside from all of this I still applaud those kids who are out there everyday in the heat and humidity. Like I keep saying, at least your hearts are in the right place even if you get on my nerves.