Charity of the Month: American Red Cross
The Gingrich Foundation proudly selects American Red Cross as its designated Charity of the Month for August.
The Gingrich Foundation proudly selects American Red Cross as its designated Charity of the Month for August.
The Oldest American Tradition: Answering When a Neighbor Calls
The alarm went out before sunrise on April 19, 1775. Riders pounded down the Boston Post Road. Church bells started in Lexington and Concord and worked their way outward through the countryside, and by mid-morning men from towns as far as 40 miles off had left their fields and shops and were walking, running, or riding toward the fight. Nobody in Acton, Bedford, or Sudbury was told the war belonged to them. They figured it out on their own.
That is the country we come from. It is worth remembering what it looked like, because Americans from Oregon to North Carolina are being asked to answer a call again. It’s a quieter one, but it’s the same in kind.
The American Red Cross has declared an emergency blood shortage. The word “emergency” gets thrown around loosely these days, so it’s worth being specific: The national supply fell about 25 percent in June, and hospitals are burning through roughly 3,500 units a week more than expected. Blood cannot be stockpiled. Red cells last 42 days. Platelets last five. There is no vault to draw from, and no way to spin one up. There is only whoever showed up this week with a rolled up sleeve.
Only about 3 percent of eligible Americans donate in a given year. That figure is not, I think, a verdict on our generosity. It is more like a habit we’ve lost. Nobody asks. Nobody organizes the church bus to the donation center anymore. The school drives that used to run every spring have thinned out. Meanwhile someone in this country receives a transfusion every two seconds — a car wreck on I-40, a woman hemorrhaging after childbirth in some rural Oregon county, a nine-year-old with sickle cell whose next transfusion is already on the calendar.
The blood itself does not know where it came from. That is part of the point. A pint drawn in Asheville can end up in a trauma bay in Portland by the end of the week. Nobody attaches a name or a politics to it. It just goes where a person is bleeding.
Which brings us back to the older habit. This country was not organized around geography or ancestry. It was organized around a unique and durable idea that citizens owe each other something even when they’ve never met — and that the debt is enforced by conscience rather than statute. The Founders staked the whole experiment on that bet. They understood the republic could not survive if Americans stopped believing the stranger a 1,000 miles away had a claim on them.
The Red Cross blood program itself was born from this instinct. The Army came to the Red Cross in 1941 and asked for a civilian donor system to keep British soldiers alive across the Atlantic. The first bloodmobile rolled into Farmingdale, New York, in March of that year. Ordinary people lined up. They had no idea whose arm would get their blood. It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now.
The minutemen did not ask whose fight it was. They grabbed what they had and went. What is being asked of us is considerably smaller. An hour. One arm. A short drive to a donation center where ever you live, from the Outer Banks to the Willamette Valley.
The person on the other end of it is not a stranger. He or she is a fellow citizen. Go.
Please join the Gingrich Foundation this August in supporting the American Red Cross. Whether you make a financial contribution, schedule a blood donation, or encourage someone else to give, you can help ensure that lifesaving blood is available when Americans need it most.