At Least, We Can Unite Around Blood

I feel like I lost a bit of my U.S. citizenship today.

For 45 years, no matter how polarized my community or my country, no matter how loud the shouting matches and the challenges to each other’s morality and humanity . . . I always felt like I could set aside differences and engage in an act of pure civic devotion to my fellow Americans at the Red Cross Bloodmobile.

Is there a civic act that is more selfless and free of prejudice than opening a vein and sharing a pint?

When I started donating in the 1960s, I saw anti-war hippies and pro-war hard hats — often after taunting each other in the streets — lying on cots beside each other, opening veins that would bleed for fellow Americans regardless of where they stood on Vietnam or any other issue. When you lie there pumping, you can be sure that there is a decent chance that the person who will live because your blood flows in them will be somebody you would otherwise regard as your enemy.

Our NumbersUSA staff today sponsored the Bloodmobile just outside our cluster of downtown Rosslyn office buildings. They knocked on all the doors of all the government, non-profit and corporate offices in these buildings and urged people to take a few steps and an hour to respond to a real emergency in the blood supply after all the bad weather.

What a strange assortment of missions and ideologies co-mingle in these office buildings that look across the Potomac at the Capitol where 535 elected representatives of the people duke it out over the very sincere differences of opinions and goals of the people who elect them. And at the end-of-the-day, the bags of life-blood from all the diversity of our buildings co-mingled in the refrigerators headed back to the distribution center.

But not my blood. For the first time in 45 years of giving, I was turned down because a medication I am likely to have to take the rest of my life disqualifies me.

I feel like one of the ways I most feel like a citizen of this country has been taken from me.

But I also felt a rush of optimism as I watched so many of the young people in our organization taking the lead today, enlisting donors and generously giving to anonymous beneficiaries who are their fellow countrymen.

Of all organizations, NumbersUSA believes in deep engagement in the political battles we think necessary. We will not shrink from stating our disagreement with those who push for a different American future than we pursue.

But perhaps all of us on all sides of all issues would better be able to not make our battles so personal and not treat large segments of our population as if they were the enemy if we could have the Bloodmobile vision of Democrats and Republicans bleeding for each other, MoveOn and Tea Party bleeding for each other, and, yes, even the leaders of low-immigration NumbersUSA and the leaders of all those high-immigration organizations donating blood happy in the possibility that it might end up benefitting the other.

We can and should engage in totally robust national debates about this country’s direction, but we can save the spilling of blood for the Red Cross.

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA

P.S. Click here to find out where you can donate blood, and where you can learn how to sponsor a blood drive.