Hard Times for Helping Hands

Language is a window into culture. A little over a hundred years ago, terrific meant frightening, horrifying. Now it means great, excellent, amazing. Seems over the span of a few generations, our culture warmed to fright and horror.

Our culture clearly has cooled on good deeds. Calling someone a do-gooder is unquestionably derogatory. Not sure when doing good became bad, but every dictionary I consulted defined it in disapproving terms: interfering, unrealistic, naïve, ineffectual, useless, annoying.

The work I’ve done is less important than helping professions like teaching, nursing and social work. Still, it got me called a do-gooder a time or two or twenty. It never once came across as a compliment. But that didn’t make me want to throw up my hands and walk away. The same cannot be said in those helping professions. Roughly 10% of caregivers in nursing homes and other residential care facilities have quit their jobs in just the last few years. Nearly one in five health care workers h…