An APO is ignorant and has a distorted sense of values. He is so ignorant that he doesn’t know something is impossible and he goes ahead and does it.

He is so backward that he still believes in the ideas that made his country great. He denies the proposition that it is not what you know, but who you know that counts and thinks that success comes to the person who can deliver the goods.

He is so mixed up that he thinks it is better to be right than rich, and that he can rise highest by staying on the level.

He thinks it is better to be free than secure – and looks for a helping hand at the end of his own arm.

An APO is so inexperienced that she cannot solve the sticky problem by sitting in an air-conditioned office and drifting into the cool stratosphere of abstract thought. She has to put her shoulder to the wheel and her hand in God’s hand, and pray like a lost sinner while she totes the barges and lifts the bales.

You cannot recognize an APO just looking at him. To an underprivileged child at Christmas he looks like Santa Claus. To the lost, bewildered freshman at registration time he looks like the Good Samaritan and his Father Confessor. To the thousands who see him sweating under the spring sun to get the vote tallied he looks like Uncle Sam in a limp shirt. To the harassed, overworked Scout Executive, the APO, ever eager to take on the job no one else had time for, looks like the Scout Oath and Law personified. To a worried university administrator he is an army of help or leader unafraid to soil his hands with the clean dirt of hard work.

And even if you know an APO today, you won’t know her tomorrow. Today, in order to stay in school, she may be an obscure part time clerk; but after a while as an APO, after becoming aware of and getting into the bloodstream of civic affairs, she’ll graduate and soon will be hiring and firing clerks by the dozen. But meanwhile she’ll spend time on committees, or running around on cold nights, working on some project, or standing on the street corner telling people where to vote and come, and listen, and be concerned. And she’ll start getting public recognition that she is not actively seeking. People she doesn’t know from Adam will call her by name on the street; and she’ll be on speaking terms with hundreds she never heard before; her professors and her boss will begin to realize what a valuable person she is; and her fellow citizens and classmates will be turning to her for leadership. And she’ll be lucky if her significant other thinks enough of her (or spouse loves her enough) not to gripe like the dickens because she doesn’t spend more time with him.

But the real reward will be the conformable realization that he or she is doing things that build communities and states and nations. He can say with solemn pride that while others stayed in the backyard, he came forward and threw down the gauntlet to the problem and injustices that hung over his campus and community. She can say that while others followed the crowd, she followed her conscience; and that she was working to keep every dot and dash in the Constitution while others were concerned only with putting kudos in the yearbook or with putting dollar signs on the ledger. When some merely moaned, “We have a problem, what will we do?” she was ready to step in. While others just pointed at the dirt, he was swinging a broom.

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This entry was posted by Zeta Omega Admin on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.