Violence on the news underlines need for voluntary community service

Miss Patricia Maria de Souza's anecdote of how to inspire youth to perform community service, rather than to compel them with incentives such as "points and rewards".

[W]hen I was a coordinator for the Being & Becoming programme in a secondary school, a team embarked on a project to collect and collate stories of good deeds highlighted in newspapers and compiled them into a booklet for all students.

We collected so many articles from teachers and students that we were able to come up with three booklets.

This is a good example of what must be done while the young remain impressionable; it requires effort and an underlying belief that doing good is its own reward, and that teachers can play that role to inspire virtue in addition to imparting academic knowledge. But Ms De Souza's letter goes awry in the last two paragraphs.

Dishing up violence day after day in great detail in newspapers and on television just serves to glorify crime, violence and the negative aspects of society.

Newspaper reports should be toned down and the kinder, more positive face of society should be highlighted more often. This can only serve to uplift our society.

Good and positive news does uplift the spirits, but I submit that detailing current affairs with brutal honesty is just as important as inspiring community service, and underlines the need to do good instead of undermining it. And unlike Ms De Souza's assertions, detailed reporting does not glorify "crime, violence and the negative aspects of society", but highlights the fact that these negative aspects exist, and it would do no one any good by sweeping them under the carpet.

Instead, these news reports should be used to emphasise the world's need for good men and women to stand up and do whatever they can to influence society for the better. Our job is to focus our energies towards addressing the underlying issues of the violence and crime that are reported, and not turn a blind eye to them, or even attempt to censor them, just because we want to uplift our spirits.

By doing so, we merely cover up the injustices, underscore our willing complicity in ignoring them, and ultimately allow the cycle of ignorance and injustice to perpetuate without recourse. The news may be uncomfortable, they may even be intolerable, but we cannot will it away while wanting our society to act in good conscience, in good faith, and uphold justice and goodwill as virtues.

Censoring the news may even have the counter-productive result of discouraging civic participation, discourse, and voluntary community service: if there isn't inequality, or people who need help, why volunteer for community service, other than to satisfy one's own need to satisfy one's narcissistic ego? By doing so, we veer away from incentivising community service as a means to score points and rewards directly into satisfying one's ego and convince oneself that all is well with the world.

All is not well. Let us not pretend that it is so, by either burying our heads in the sand or by censoring the depressing on TV. This underlines the need for good men and women to step forward, and give their time and effort towards serving the community in order to set things right, or at least make the situation better, for those who need it. The courage to do so should be inspiring to everyone.

(h/t: Gerald Ho)