When the leaves begin turning yellow, orange, and red, we see Forest Festival volunteers working all over the Elkins community.

On Friday we saw the red t-shirts for United Way Day of Action, This week we celebrated volunteers who let their lights shine to help Kump Education Center create a brighter future.

Our volunteers helped me remember our shared history and think about the ways we can teach the next generation what we learned from the generations before us about honesty, kindness, and responsibility. Volunteering is an affirmation of our shared humanity. It is the essence of humane ethical reasoning that goes beyond the realm of artificial intelligence.

Volunteers help us teach banking, building, cooking, foreign language, gardening, math, music, planting trees, reading aloud, and walking in our wetland are some of the active ways that students learn at Kump Center. We have high school and college tutors — as well as retired teachers willing to work one-to-one with children using hands-on activities to apply what kids study in school.

Volunteerism is the bedrock of our West Virginia mountain tradition. People in the mountains could not always get the help they needed from outside; they had to depend on family and neighbors. When George Washington was planning to build a continental army to fight the British, he knew he could depend on Appalachian volunteers.

Washington had a real respect for the character and discernment of his rural soldiers. He said they could be led, but they could not be driven by tyrants.

He worked to teach them civility and build their understanding of democracy depending on the responsibility and respectability of all citizens.

Mountaineers would always be free as long as they did not allow a king to require their allegiance.

Now that the Forest Festival Queen is going to be a Kump, I feel some ambivalence about the concept of royalty. I believe that we may confuse the symbolism of royalty with the political power of a tyrant. A true leader is someone who really recognizes and respects the light within each person. The power of the leader comes from the people, not the other way around.

The problem with royal power is something that Governor H.G. Kump never forgot. He was proud to represent the people of West Virginia, but he would not want us to make his home a monument to him.

He and Edna made education and welfare of all people the central purpose of their lives because they understood that a great society depends on that little voluntary light that shines within individual members of any organization — whether it is a family, a city, a state, or a nation.