30% of Americans volunteered to serve in their communities last year.

[girl gone mad]

Oopsie!!

About 60.8 million people volunteered through or for an organization at
least once between September 2006 and September 2007, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The proportion
of the population who volunteered was 26.2 percent. This 0.5 percentage
point decrease in the volunteer rate follows a decline of 2.1 percentage
points in the prior year. The volunteer rate had held constant at 28.8 per-
cent from 2003 through 2005, after rising slightly from its 2002 level of
27.4 percent.


http://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm

[K8-EEE]

1. Don't they have any REAL responsibilites?

That really really insulted me, as a community volunteer. Fuck her.

[fulllib]

2. It insulted

60,000,000 people. Guaranteed.

[K8-EEE]

3. I think the backlash will be huge.

She's an idiot. Just reading a canned speech by Dubya's snark-writers.

[Captiosus]

4. If I wasn't already a democrat,

her comment would have pissed me off to an extreme.

I'm an Eagle Scout, I've been an Assistant Scoutmaster for 6 years - even while railing against the BSA National Council on their myopic views on homosexuality and atheism - because the program gave a lot to me as a youth and I, in turn, wish to give back to it. The cornerstone of the BSA is community service and I've been active in community service since I was 12 years old thanks to Scouting.

So, basically, Palin just insulted everything the BSA taught me and everything I try to teach to Scouts in the program about being active in the community for the betterment of all.

[girl gone mad]

6. It was the combination..

of her statement and the vitriolic over-reaction that ensued.

Welcome to DU! My son was a Scout.

[Retrograde]

5. "community organizer" is code for

godless liberal socialist communists who want to destroy America. It certainly doesn't mean the people who volunteer at libraries, homeless shelters, women's shelters, and so forth - unless, of course, they're gay or feminazis or otherwise not likely to vote Republican. Just like mentioning San Francisco is code for those Democ-RATS want to teach sodomy in the schools.

(Yes, I do some volunteer work - in San Francisco and on the peninsula. I think the figures given actually underestimate the amount of volunteer work in the US, since it probably doesn't include people like my mother who knit articles for people in hospitals, or the other small random acts of kindness)