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Our View: Youth Service Day fuels renewed hope

By Staff | Apr 25, 2007

This past week’s edition of The Mirror included a front-page story on a group of volunteers that should be required reading for young and old alike.

Under the headline “Youthful volunteers use day to serve seniors,” the story told of the volunteer services of 125 people who spread out across the county to do chores for more than 30 homebound senior citizens. The work included raking leaves, tidying up in and around houses … pretty much anything you would think of as spring-cleaning.

The participating volunteers — 4-H members, their friends and parents — should be congratulated for their efforts. One of the event’s youthful organizers said some clients “are so happy that someone cares enough to come to their homes that they cry. They offer to pay us money and they want to bake us cookies.”

Those are heartwarming thoughts, and they should renew in us a hope that as terrible a world we live in today — with campus shootings, suicide bombings, rampant crime, racist and misogynistic loudmouths on the radio — there still are people who believe in helping strangers because it’s the right thing to do.

They might have called it Youth Service Day, but it really served all of us.