"Don't Forget" was the title given to an address by William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army in 1910. My son Joshua, a Salvation Army officer, sent me this.
"I am glad you are enjoying yourself. The salvation business is a friend of happiness. Making heaven on earth is our business. Serve the Lord with gladness is one of our favorite mottos. So I am pleased that you are pleased! But amidst all your joys don't forget the sons and daughters of misery. Do you ever visit them? Come away and let us make a call or two. Here is a home, six in family, they eat and drink and sleep and sick and die in the same chamber. Here is a drunkard hovel, void of furniture, wife a skeleton, children in rags; father now sleeping, the victims of his neglect. Here are the unemployed, wandering about, seeking work and finding none. Yonder are the wretched criminals cradled in crime passing in and out of the prisons all the time. There are the Daughter of shame deceived and wronged and ruined. Traveling down the dark and blind to an early grave. There are the children, fighting in the gutter, going hungry to school. Growing up to fill their parents places. Brought it all on themselves, you say? Perhaps so. But that does not excuse our assisting them. You don?t demand a certificate of virtue before you drag some drowning creature out of the water. Nor the assurance in a man of faded grace before you deliver him from the burning building. But what shall we do? Content ourselves by singing a hymn? Offering a prayer? Or giving a little good advice? NO! Ten thousand times no! We will forgive them. Feed them! Reclaim them. Employ them!Perhaps we shall fail with many. Quite likely. But our business is to help them all the same. And that in the most practical, economical and Christlike manner. So let us hasten to the rescue for the sake of our own peace, the poor wretches themselves, ____ (dean?) of these children, and the danger(Savior?) of us all. But you must help with the means. And there is nothing like the present. Who in this company will lend a hand by taking up the gauntlet?"
What is most interesting in terms of safety is that this address was given close to the time of what is called the first National Safety Council Congress in Milwaukee. At that time the keynote speaker, U.S. Secretary of Labor described safety as "Applied Christianity."
That time is ripe that safety be viewed not as a business with unprovable cause and effect relationships enforced by government but as a human service event much as Booth describes it.
David Sneed
The desire for effective and efficient safety results is growing in the context of small communities. Collaboration is a way of spreading the news and furthering the cause at the grassroots level.
