''I just wanna play Nintendo,'' the kid said.
''Yeah, me too,'' I thought. ''But for some inexplicable reason I volunteered to coach your basketball team, and then like a moron I promised all the parents that every kid would score before the season is over and now we only have two games left so tie your sneakers and GET BACK IN THERE.''
I didn't say that, but it didn't matter what I said. He wasn't listening. Nobody was paying attention to me. Getting 10 second-graders to simultaneously listen to anything is not exactly impossible. But it is a statistical improbability that is about as likely as being obliterated by a hurtling asteroid on the same day a lightning bolt burns up your winning lottery ticket.
Sure, it could happen tomorrow - or maybe in 300,000 years.
In other words, about the same odds that the president's Volunteer Summit will produce results that remotely resemble its Oprah-government rhetoric.
Such summits are relatively harmless. They keep a lot of powerful people occupied eating donuts, air-kissing celebrities, spouting sanctimonious sermons and patting themselves on the back for their patriotic, selfless dedication to roll up their sleeves, grapple with a Great American Issue - and tell the rest of us what to do about it.
Invariably, the answer is ''spend more money.'' But for a whole week, they are only talking about spending money and doing no real permanent damage to our property and liberty or our children's future. Mostly, these exotic summit critters can't survive outside the cloying hothouse of media lights, and crawl off to die without a whimper. President Bush's Education Summit will forever be enshrined in American history as a one-word footnote: ''Duh?''
Not to be outdone by the Education President, our Volunteer President gathered some of the nation's great thinkers - John Travolta, Jimmy Carter, Michael Bolton, Brooke Shields, Sinbad, Gerald Ford, and L.L. Cool J - and came up with some real brain-busters. Such as:
Paid volunteers. Mr. Clinton wants $3 billion to hire ''volunteers'' to teach kids to read by third grade. (I thought those were called ''teachers.'') And he wants 50,000 more troops in his social-worker militia, AmeriCorps, which pays $5,000 a year for ''community service.''
Mandatory volunteers. Volunteer service could be required for high school graduation, as in Maryland.
I guess it requires a contradiction in terms to describe a paradox like ''government volunteers.'' The job of government is to require things that are involuntary - taxes, defense, highways, welfare - for the good of all. Mixing government mandates with things we do voluntarily is like a marriage of Ellen DeGeneres and G. Gordon Liddy. It's like putting the IRS in charge of charity, or asking the EPA to design a car - you'd get a pollution-free bicycle that costs more than a Mercedes.
I suppose the government could do a lot worse than pay college tuition for kids who work in nursing homes. ''Service hours'' work fine in many private schools, and I don't see why they can't be an elective in public schools, too. People who say it's ''slavery'' to ask students to help children with homework or clean up highway litter are just as warped as the welfare hustlers who claim that volunteerism is a cruel plot to take away entitlements.
But as a sometimes volunteer, I find it insulting and demeaning to be lectured on the topic by a political parasite who has never volunteered for anything but a public paycheck.
It's not about Bill Clinton's plan to replace big government with ''big citizens'' who are bribed to be kind or coerced to care. It's about doing something you know needs to be done for only one motive: because it's right.
It's not about a lot of fatuous foolishness about saving the world, like Hillary Clinton's boast that ''what we are doing is essential to revitalize American democracy.'' It's long hours, frustrating meetings, missed meals, a constant tug from family and work, shoulders that ache from the burden of crushed lives, eye-watering smells and sights that are tattooed on your memory like bruises on a battered child.
The biggest joke from the president's modest ''Summit for America's Future'' was the way volunteering was sold like tickets to Disney World.
Fun, fun, fun.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It's not Thrill City, or there would be no shortage of volunteers. But not even government can kill the volunteer spirit, because it has its moments.
When I told the Nintendo Kid to get back in the game, he gave me a storm-cloud look, stuck out his lower lip like a drawer of pouts and grudgingly dragged his double-tied sneakers onto the court. Then a few minutes later he scored - and his face lit up with more watts than all the stars on the president's summit.
That's what it's about.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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