last year an awful lot of people responded to the twin hurricanes in LA and Mississippi by volunteering to help without expectations of compensation, recognition or reward. In my own case I felt like it was about 60% my duty as a civil servant and most of the rest was a sort of citizenship thing. In all honesty, until I started writing this post I haven't thought about my own motivations. It gives me pause.

Be that as it may, I worked with a bunch of men who quite literally had nothing more than their clothes who literally spent a week trying to help the immediate victims of the flood. It wasn't like they could expect a huge insurance settlement or could clip coupons later: Those guys had little more than a job before the storm and even that was taken from them. Yet they showed-up every morning, despite living in conditions so miserable as to defy description, hoping to help their neighbors. That is public service.

So guess what happened tonight. I know a man (an upper-level civil servant mgr) who works for a federal agency in a suburb of Washington who came to NOLA for ONE DAY, got his photo taken, and returned. He signed some papers authorizing what we were already doing. Last night he was awarded a plaque of some sort and $10K for his humanitarian contribution.

Your tax dollars at work.

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