Day of Caring

Every year, the United Way has a "Day of Caring" in the county I work in. The business I work for is always heavily involved in promoting and volunteering for the annual event.

Today was that day. My employer paid me a full days wages to do 4 hours worth of volunteer work. Not too shabby. If I remember correctly, they have 290 seperate types of community service work. Everything from house painting for the elderly to garbage clean up along the river. One of my co-workers is the Head Honcho for a church group that collects old piece o' crap bicycles, fixes them up and donates them to homeless people. He also happens to be a "nuetral" who seems interested in my hobby.

That's what I did all morning...fix bicycles. Free coffee, free donuts and all the grease you could slather on both. After a free lunch, the afternoon crew took over and worked another 4 hours. The nice lady and Head Honcho from the church told us that they would be absolutely thrilled if we could deliver 10 functional bikes in 8 hours, as they had that many requests already pending.

We had a pile of "projects" and a near equal pile of bikes that were deemed unrepairable and only useful for spare parts. All I can say is that in 4 hours, we delivered no less than 16 serious Frankenstien bikes out of the garage. Each given a test ride around the block to ensure functionality and safety. Tools were scarce so we had to go all McGyver on some of them and use some good ol' fashioned creativity.

What's all this doing on a gun blog?

Well...

Since I'm a gun owner and therefore an obvious racist/homophobe/religious fanatic, I stipulated that the 4 bikes I repaired could only go to republican Chistian white heterosexual overwieght upper-class homeless men with a tiny penis, over 40 years of age.

When I made this demand of the nice church lady, I removed my pants and slapped my junk on the remaining donuts for proper emphasis.

We all spend a great deal of time talking about guns and ballistics and the law and the courts and the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and all the studies and statistics and everything else and whatever and that.

Take a break once in awhile and talk about the potential mental damage of a young homeless boy's life riding around town on a bike with pink rims.

Volunteer.

Volunteer for something.

Volunteer for anything.

P.S. A can of black spray paint can do more than mark gang territory.

We win not only because we're right on one issue; we win because we continue to build support amongst those who have their own dedications focused elsewhere.

Never forget that.