Admit it: Every so often, when you’re at your wits’ end and there are no parking spaces anywhere within sight of a store’s entrance, those empty spaces marked with blue wheelchairs look awfully tempting.
Most of us just keep on driving, knowing that to give in to the temptation takes a chance of denying a person with disabilities access.
Empathy encourages the search for parking tocontinue.
It was a fair dose of empathy that recently sparked a shift of several Benton County offces to make the Veterans Services offce more accessible to those it’s intended to serve.
Reporter Tom Sissom described the current situation quite well: The Veterans Services off ce is in a third-fl oor offce in the southwest corner of the County Administration Building downtown. Visitors get oft the elevator, turn left, then turn left again to walk down a hallway to the corridor paralleling the east side of the building. A right turn takes them to the south end of the building where they turn right again and walk back to James’ off ce, which looks out over the parking lot on the west side of the building.
Whew! We got worn out just reading about the journey.
“It’s not that they can’t get here,” Stele James, the county’s veteran services off cer, told Sissom recently. “It’s just the amount of energy it takes. I have two men who carry those little tri-fold stools.
They get oft the elevator, come down one hallway and have to stop and sit down. They get up, come down the second hallway and have to sit down again. It takes them three stops to get from there to here.”
Benton County offcials are shufi ing off ces around so that veterans, many of whom suft er ailments that make it diffcult to get around, will be able to step oft the elevator and simply cross a lobby area to get to James’ off ce.
Kudos to the county offcials who worked together to make this happen. They’ve all done a great service to the veterans in need of help.
A GREAT EXAMPLE OF VOLUNTEERING
Thirty years is a long time.
Granted, it’s not as long as it used to seem, but the point remains.
Imagine doing the same job for that long. Now, envision doing that job for no pay.
That’s exactly what we learned about Bill Carter the other day. For three decades, he’s been the voice booming over the loudspeakers at Jarrell Williams Bulldog Stadium in Springdale.
Carter, who has a full-time job in the private sector, nonetheless devotes his Friday nights to volunteering for the job.
He’s a prime example of the kind of spirit people around Northwest Arkansas demonstrate time and again. Without volunteers, so many of the events at local schools simply couldn’t happen.
In his case, Carter occasionally gets a free hot dog or something along those lines, but the real satisfaction is knowing he’s helping the team, the school, the community.
So here’s a pat on the back of Bill Carter. We hope he won’t mind us using him as a stand-in for all those volunteers throughout the community who often do major work without recognition. But we know volunteerism is its own reward. Making a difterence, well, makes a difterence in one’s life. We encourage it at schools, churches, local nonprofi t groups, wherever there’s a need.
Volunteers help Northwest Arkansas score big in so many ways. We appreciate every one of them.
Opinion, Pages 5 on 10/01/2012