I lost a sibling to suicide and it took years to stop blaming myself and to stop taking it personally. But until then it felt like a 3D Escher staircase embedded in my head that I couldn't resolve. Since then I volunteer my time to try to help depressed people however i can. But it's not about me, it's about this video and i'm glad this guy made it.

What are you talking about? I said NOTHING about abuse.

I was talking about people leaving a church, and yeah, that is something that I have experience of.

Besides, one doesn't have to have personal experience of something to comment on it. In fact, it's often helpful to be able to address an issue without the emotional baggage. There's a reason we don't allow crime victims to set the sentence of criminals, for example.

It is utterly unreasonable to ask people about their private lives in a public discussion. If they choose to volunteer that information, fine, but it's not a prerequisite to participate in a discussion.

Matt said no.

Any volunteers? It really is a fine whiskey, and it's running out quickly. It would be a shame to waste it on frivolous drinking.

Your video, Russian volunteer to have world's 1st head transplant, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

"Did you punch that one-legged old Benita?" one officer says.

"I was about to kick her in her ****ing nub," another officer replies.

Marla James volunteers at the Sky High Collective. She's legally blind and says several medical issues keep her confined to a wheelchair.

"How can I respect someone like that? It just makes your stomach turn -- maybe she doesn't know what it's like to have an amputation. I don't know what was going through her head, but man that was so disrespectful," James said.

She now plans to sue the city for the actions of the female officer in the video.

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Protect and serve, protect and serve. Classy people, one and all. Don't you just feel so warm and protected after seeing our law enforcement mistreating handicapped people, eating pot brownies, and trying to destroy evidence?

Dunno why this got downvoted because it's bang on the mark. A government only has power as long as it's allowed to govern. Does anyone think a government would continue to function if 100 million American's just up and decided they weren't going to pay taxes any more until shit got sorted out? Or actively rise up?

It's waaay to easy to shift the blame because people are apathetic and lazy. It's the government, thanks Obama, get on a forum somewhere and rant their ass off and what changes? Not a damn thing. And when the voters aren't willing to take the responsibility for watching over their democracy, is the government going to volunteer when they are already balls deep up the ass?

BK33, I believe that you believe the shit you are peddling, which is far more tragic than if you were just a troll. Both parties are too blame for taking advantage of citizen apathy, but citizens are to blame for letting things get that way in the first place.

American's are always big on their rights. Well, with rights comes responsibility. BK33, you don't want to take any responsibility, you'll end up with no rights, simple as that.

My solution, since we can't get congress to govern themselves (meaning there will never be a federal law against buying congress) we should use local elections to pass local/state laws making it a felony for your representative to accept any money from anyone outside the area they represent, or to accept over a certain amount from a single donor, including gifts, salaries, free work (even volunteered work), perks, travel, food, vacations, or anything else with any value, punishable by immediate removal from office and mandatory jail time.
In California at least, we have the option to write our own laws and have them voted on directly by the populace (ballot initiatives)...real democracy...I know that's not true everywhere, but where it is it should be taken advantage of and used to fix problems our representatives refuse to fix. It's the only solution I see being possible...and even then only possible for some of us.

We had a squirrel behave a bit like this in our yard a few years ago. It kept trying and failing to climb a tree, couldn't get more than a foot off the ground without falling off backwards. We happened to know someone who volunteers at a local wildlife rescue center, so I put on some thick gloves and grabbed it in a nice soft towel, then put it in a cat carrier. A few days later we heard back that it had made a full recovery, and they suspected it was drunk. Turns out that when doing some home renovation my father in law had moved our compost bin slightly, but not all of the compost that it was covering. We assume the squirrel got into some old fruit that had fermented and got good and tore up.

She can't handle them? I volunteer as a tribute! I will love them and her as they all should be...

Speaking to kids as though they are idiots is a terrible approach, and people really shouldn't do that. Even as young as six or so, most of them are much more intelligent and thoughtful than they're usually given credit for.

Granted, I wouldn't want to dictate the way other people raise their kids, but the years I spent volunteering with children taught me that they will be a lot more open, honest and comfortable with you if you converse with them with all the seriousness and respect that you would an important adult, but of course all the while understanding and having empathy for their necessarily limited set of experiences, egocentricity and smaller view of the world. For example, "my best friend hates me" seems trivial to an adult ("make new friends"), but could be a kid's whole world crashing down.

Even though the people in this video are doing an admirable job (even those who screwed up earlier by inventing a fairy tales to avoid a brief moment of embarrassment), the underlying subtext that the kids are likely picking up from their parents obvious uncomfortableness is that sex is a shameful thing and that discussing it (such as if they have questions in the future) will be painful and is best avoided.

I live in the city, but my Dad lives out at Mt Barker and my sister lives near Tea Tree Gully and she had some tense moments recently.
I feel it needs stressing that these guys and gals are not professionals, but volunteers. They have lives and jobs like anyone else and every summer they come out to save lives and homes. Absolute champions.

When I first started volunteering to serve at a homeless shelter, many years ago, I didn't know exactly why I was doing it. Certainly it felt like the "right" thing to do. I was at least confident that I wasn't doing it for personal gain because I didn't wear it on my sleave, didn't brag about it or hang my ego on my personal identity of being a good person. When dissillusionment set in, when I realized just how many of the people I was serving were homeless by choice, I pushed through and carried on...and I still didn't know why. I just trusted that I would get it one day.

Eventually I made a connection to the time I spent living in Sweden. In the town I lived in, every night a group of vagrants assembled in the market square. Every bit as dirty and drunken as the worst homeless person that most people imagine them all to be. Fighting, having sex in the public restroom, vomiting and carrying on loudly all night. But this was socialism, so they went home every night to their government payed for apartments. I realized that no matter what you do, there will always be a segment of society that just doesn't give a Fuck and is happy to take and never give back. We've all known these people. Family members, friends, acquaintances, who use up the good will of everyone they meet until they've got no one left to use and it falls to the larger community to support them. No economy, government or community planning will ever compell them to support themselves. We loathe them and shun them. Politicians with ulterior motives tell us that ALL homeless and disadvantaged ARE them. But it's a lie. There are the mentally and physically ill who have no support structure, who NEED their communities to help them. Most of these people were once functioning members of their communities who no longer have the ability to survive on their own.
And so I came to understand that it's better to feed a hundred leaches to serve a single helpless individual.

Boy was I proud of myself for realizing that.

And then I was layed off and my job shipped to India, followed closely by my wife spending a year in and out of the hospital, with no insurance. A careers worth of hard work, reduced to a data point on a corporate profit sheet. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, when the medical debt comes for me and everything I've built in my life is taken, to become a line in someone else's ledger. Betrayed by the greed in the system. Because I upheld my end of the social contract. I worked hard in school, excelled in my career, had two kids and bought a house in a neighborhood with good schools. But the system is run by the greediest and most power hungry. Politics and business is the domain of the high functioning sociopath. And to a sociopath, you're not a real person like them. You're a data point, a line in the ledger.

Then I came to respect the other segment of the homeless. The ones who rejected the social contract, who don't feel societal pressure to give more than they take. Because they got it right. It's all a lie. You don't earn anything in America. You don't deserve the fruits of your labor. You subsist at the whim of the people with money and power. And when it serves them, you get nothing.

We are all standing in line for food, hoping there's a room for the night.

Widespread, cheap video capture has not exactly created a very good perception of Russia has it.

ps. I liked that a hammer was volunteered. I very much wish I'd known what fantastic plan they'd devised with that particular tool.

Now that you mention it, it would make sense you're totally right. It doesn't at all seem natural or necessary to speak the way he did, mentioning that she "volunteered" as opposed to just generally saying she helped.