BRATTLEBORO — It's been a rough year down in the soup kitchen.
Three of our staff people have died, we have been flooded in our basement, the walls fell in in our cool room, and most recently in the cold weather we have suffered an inexplicable lack of meat for two weeks.
A direct supply link to a supermarket has gone astray, and the Vermont Foodbank has no meat protein to offer us - and the weather has been brutal. We carry on with what we have.
A tedious thing to go through is being thanked for what we do. No one actually knows what that is, since we never see any press nor politicians, even at the town level, and at the personal level, one wonders why people thank us. Don't they contribute anything of themselves such as to make what we do exceptional? Apparently not.
Apparently, volunteerism is in severe decline in our aging community, though the work of volunteers actually makes life in and out of our town possible at a certain level of quality and assurance.
This writing is not to seek money or promote a cause. It is more about a sense of things being driven increasingly into the shade for volunteer workers, and their clients.
It is a sense of a declining social ethic about contribution - and it used to be around here that if you had it you would share it - instead of increasing social rhetoric about how things are, which, I can tell you, does not peel any carrots, and neither does it have anyone meet their less fortunate neighbors and treat them like citizens for as much as an hour at a time.