As our faithful readers are no doubt painfully aware, here at The Outrage we often have a hard time understanding the English language.
For example, the Chicago Tribune features an interesting headline about one of the Chicago public school systems voting to "mandate charity work." We find this perplexing.
We had always thought that the idea of mandating charity was something of an oxymoron. After all, our trusty Webster's dictionary tells us that mandate means "to order or command." The several different definitions of charity include concepts of love and generosity. Can you FORCE people to be loving and generous?
If you force people to give you their car we call it grand theft. Forced sex is called rape. But we've never really been very good at understanding esoteric ideas like love and generosity. We guess they're different.
The Chicago Tribune article gets even more confusing. It talks about the growing number of school districts in the U.S. that are REQUIRING VOLUNTEER WORK. Can you REQUIRE someone to volunteer for something?
Some students say that "by mandating service administrators make it seem more like a dreaded chore than an expression of personal values." Hmmm... that's a little lofty for us. But we do know that we used to walk over to Grandma Outrage's house just to say hi. Grandma was kinda lonely and it made us feel good to brighten her day. Then one day Mother Outrage told us we had to visit Grandma once a week. So we stopped our visits completely.
Other students complain that they have other things to do -- frivolous things like studying and earning money at part-time jobs.
Carlos Azcoitis, Chicago's deputy chief education officer, says, "Students need to learn they can become resources for their community." What if they don't WANT to become "resources for their community?"
We always thought that being forced to work without pay was the same thing as SLAVERY. But our boss, the publisher, thinks that Volunteer Service may not be such a bad idea. We kinda need to cut down on overhead.
(Source: Chicago Tribune.)
