2 posts tagged “charity”

Those of you who know me know how I feel about homelessness and the holidays.

My own personal efforts diminish this time of year because so many others step up to help.

Guess what, people? This year, there's been an increase in food insecurity of about 40% around here. That means there are 40% more people who don't know for sure where their next meal is coming from or what it will be. And the increase in food donations and help for feeding the food insecure? It's only increased 3%

Do you understand numbers? I don't. I understand faces, though. I'm seeing a lot of new faces at the places where I deliver the sandwiches I make for Sandwich Saturdays. Last Saturday, in one of the places where I deliver sandwiches, one of the homeless was dead - starved to death. In America. In a land where we waste more food than we eat.

I'm not a rich person. I am myself only a step or two away from homelessness again. The sandwiches I make and deliver on Saturdays is a preciously small barrier against the relentlessness of hunger. I couldn't save the man who died, and there are so many more who will die - of hunger - this winter.

They'll die because they can't get to the food distribution centers to get food. They don't have transportation or the money free to spend on transportation, which is terribly terribly expensive and inconvenient in this city. The food distribution centers are desperate for food to give to the people who can get there. That's why I drive out to where the homeless hide and drop off the sandwiches, and the gift certificates for free things, and bus tokens, and anything else I can scrounge up for them.

And the ones who do have homes are in hardly better shape - the old handicapped and/or frail women and the young women with children living in Section 8 housing just barely a step up from living in the street.

They get food, and the young ones have no clue how to get the most out of black bananas and bruised apples. I can see their reluctance to root through boxes of moldy vegetables to find the few that are still marginally good.  Limp carrots and soft potatoes are still good to eat, but they throw them away because they know any better.  I give them cards about locavore classes - learning how to use what food is seasonally available and how to preserve and use what they can find. I'll see their faces, maybe, if they can get a ride to where I hold the classes. I have them in different places, usually picnic shelters, all around town.

Most years, there's a surplus of food this time of year - turkeys, and sometimes hams, chicken, and bread and fruit. And lots of whipping cream.  I show them how to smoke the meats so they'll stay edible longer, and how to cook with them later. I show them how to cook in picnic shelter fireplaces without pots or utensils. I show them how to make butter from the surplus of whipping cream. Butter lasts longer than cream. If there’s enough, we make soft cheeses, too.  And when I have them, I hand out Zip-Locs like nobody's business, because you can save a lot of food in them and stash them in hidden places so the food isn't taken when they are forced into shelters.

Yes, you read that right. Homeless people are sent through metal detectors, wanded, and forced to empty their bags and pockets, and all "contraband" is confiscated. Contraband includes food, shampoo, books, T-shirts with sayings that are "inappropriate", cigarettes, bottles with any kind of liquid in them. Most homeless avoid the shelters as long as they can, and I don't blame them.  It’s not that shelter workers want to do all of this, it’s because laws and regulations require them to.

When I was homeless, at least I was spared the indignity of emptying my pockets and purse, of walking through a metal detector and being wanded, of having what few things I had taken from me. All they threatened to take from me were my children. And today, if I was innocent now as I was then, they'd probably succeed.

I don't think I could survive homelessness today, not with the current attitude towards the homeless, the casual cruelty displayed towards them, the heavy blame heaped upon them for their situation.  It seems like everywhere I go, people are sneering at the homeless and the poor, looking down on them unkindly because they happen to be going through a rough spell.  I live in a heavily dominionist Christian part of the country.  It’s not the worst, but it’s bad enough.  Here, people believe that others are poor because they deserve to be poor, that it’s God’s judgment on them.

They never once think that perhaps their God’s judgement is upon them for the way they treat the poor.  One of the core precepts of most religions around the world is providing charity - food to the hungry, clothing and blankets to the cold, a roof for the homeless, medical assistance for the sick, and job opportunities so the poor can rise above their poverty.  How people treat the poor is a reflection, not on the poor, but on themselves.  And we live in a very ugly society right now.

All you rich people out there, who have never been homeless, who have never had to decide if you would eat that piece of bologna even if it was turning iridescent around the edges, indicating it was beginning to rot; you won't understand just how bad it can get. And if you dare to blame any homeless or hungry person for their situation, look to your own situation and ask yourself - have I done anything that would allow them the grace and dignity to better themselves?

Do your state and county "poor relief" laws and regulations do anything to make their lives easier? Or do they contain double-binds intended to extinguish them, to keep them powerless and poor? Do your vagrancy laws treat the homeless like criminals?  Can the hungry get to the food? What programs allow landlords and utilities to waive deposits to allow the marginally homeless back into homes? What regulations keep people from sharing living space just because they aren’t related?  What regulations require people to have an address before they can get an address of their own - and can they be repealed or altered to allow the newly homeless as well as the long term homeless a chance at having a home? How efficient is the public transportation system, and what programs are available to allow fare reductions to the poor?    

We have to go beyond bandaging the problem and reach to the roots of it to fix it.  And there are so many ways to that - as many ways as there are to become poor, there are even more ways to fix poverty.  Find them.  And then, do them.

If you are among those who donate food at Thanksgiving and Christmas, why do you stop there? People are hungry all year round. Why not space out your donations so they feed people in March and July as much as in November and December? Why not organize a monthly food drive among your friends and co-workers? It only takes a little time, and you can still do other things while it's going on.

And those of you are reading me through a library terminal somewhere - you are paying "invisible taxes" huge ones - and that means your vote counts. Use it to improve your life. Track how you are served, and what improvements need to be made. And if those lawmakers whine about "it costs too much/can't raise taxes", remind them of the percentage of your income that is spent paying taxes already. Track all kinds of things - how much you spend in transportation, your time and expenses in feeding yourself and others in equally dire conditions. Track how you organize to help one another, and use that as a reality-based model for proposing changes. Let them know that you can get together with all the other hungry people and together you are a powerful voting block. Let them know you aren't just hungry for food, but that you are hungry for justice as well, and you are willing to work to make the changes that need to happen.

Most rich people have no clue. It's up to us poor people to show them the way.

A gunman kills one girl and himself, threatens 5 other girls in Colorado. A gunman kills the school principal in Wisconsin. A gunman causes 2 schools in Las Vegas to shut down. A gunman kills 5 girls and wounds 5 others before killing himself in Pennsylvania.  In America, we concentrate on the gun in these instances. It's not the guns, or the ownership of the guns that's the problem, although I have absolutely no doubt that these incidents will increase the hue and cry to make gun ownership illegal.

Guns do cause damage and can kill, in the same way cars do. Or knives. Or canned goods. Or bottles of water. Banning all fluids because someone claimed they could make a bomb with it was ludicrous. It's not the fluids that are at fault. Banning fluids or guns or canned goods won't prevent people from killing one another. It will only make them more determined and creative in the methods they use to do the killing. That's why canned goods are on my list. A well-tossed can of soup can kill as surely as a well-aimed gun.

It's not the objects that are at fault. Banning them won't end the passion that caused them to be used to wound and to kill.

Why aren't we addressing the underlying problems? The gunman in Pennsylvania's wife said her husband killed those girls for an incident that happened 20 years ago - before these girls were ever even born. The drifter who killed the girl and himself in Colorado - who knows what his problems were? He had no one to listen to him, no one to care. Where were people to help these men before they were driven to desperation and killed others?

We need to ask ourselves some seriously hard questions about where society as a whole is heading. We've seen that banning doesn't stop the killing. Banning is the least effective method we have to deal with this - and yet, it is the one method our society and governments choose to use over all others available to us. We need to eliminate banning objects as a first response (or even a last response, really - it just plain does not work) for any assumed threat.

What other methods do we have available? There are lots to choose from. The easiest change to make would be the commercials and ads aired on TV or placed in print media. Too many of them use themes of selfishness, revenge, violence, and sex to sell their product. I've been boycotting the products whose ads convey a negative social image for their product - particularly the ones that attack their competitors and resort to namecalling.  Once people are no longer being bombarded with ads containing images of selfishness and revenge, the message that it's OK to grab all you can at the expense of others will ease. Consider the ads for one particular bite-sized candy and for most brands of chips.  This candy company markets their product with the message to "buy extra to share" - it's even on their packaging:  the "share bag" of the candy.  Most chips, however, show ads where people hide their bags of chips from their family members so they can eat it alone.  That insurance commercial where one person does a good deed, is seen by someone not involved in the deed then does a good deed, and it spreads throughout - that's a great commercial.  The phone commercial where the mother and daughter are screaming kind words to one another is a humorous way of getting the point across that not all conversations between parent and child must be fraught with anger.  I'm really happy to see that some companies are already trending towards this method of social responsibility. 

And guess what?  We didn't have to create laws to force them to do this.  That's the best kind of change, the ones that come because people see that it's needed.

Making advertising more socially acceptable isn't enough, though, because these images are coming from multiple sources.  It's only a step in the right direction.

News reporting of violence needs to be less glamorous and more factual. There should be a stronger emphasis on why the act is wrong, what the punishment for it is, and a showing of community support - and not the "man on the street" interviews advocating more violence. That's not support, that's sensationalism. Support is showing what the community is doing to repair the damage, clean things up, and what their plans for the future will be - and those plans should not include banning objects, setting up barricades, or limiting the freedoms of the innocent. The ones who commit the acts of violence should be shown being tried and if convicted, appropriately punished.  Imprisonment shouldn't be the only form of punishment we offer as a society.

That brings us to punishment.  Incarceration is failing dismally.  The only people who should be in prisons are the ones we dare not allow to run free - those convicted of violent crimes who cannot or will not be rehabilitated:  murderers, rapists, pedophiles.  We have the technology to enforce other types of punishments on lesser criminals.  Restitution should be the focus of punishment for those types of criminals, not just through community service, but through repaying the victims of their criminal act.

There needs to be a more visible presence for small charities. I'm not talking the mega charities but the little ones like Modest Needs and Sandwich Saturdays and Handy Bags. These are family and small community driven charities - 100% of the effort goes directly to the people being helped; none of it is sidetracked into the advertising costs, employee wages and benefits, overhead expenses, or layers of governmental reporting that suck at the mega charities.  I have nothing against the purposes for the mega-charities - they had good intentions until the govenment came along and added so many layers of expense to their operations that they can't help as many as they once did.  I have only sympathy for thier plight.

TV series shows also need to be re-evaluated.  A lot of the reality shows are being scripted to highlight people's worst behaviors:  selfishness, revenge, bad-mouthing others, egotistical actions, and even bordering onto assaulting one another.  You'll still see glimpses of decent human behavior, but they are sadly only glimpses.  I don't know why producers of these shows seem to think that good acts, kindness, cooperation against odds, and such are boring.  I'd watch shows that had such things in them.  And sitcoms?  It's not funny, watching children smart-mouthing their parents and the other adults about them.  It's not funny watching adults bumbling about like idiots, and having some child save the day with "child wisdom".  It's not funny watching couples presumably married for decades acting like spoiled children and being shown by the newlyweds or their children or - worse, some neighbor child - how to resolve a simple marital issue.  It's not funny watching people trying to one-up or insult one another just to get a little short term egoboo or a few weak laughs.

There are a few TV shows that do demonstrate a social awareness without being preachy:  "House" is one such show.  I still quibble with a few details (I won't get into those here), but it demonstrates honor, dedication, perseverance, and a demand for excellence that is lacking in much of society today.  "Numb3rs" also has a few problems (mostly because it focuses on crime, and it could be so much more), but it also demonstrates some sterling examples of how people should treat one another without being preachy.  Both shows are entertaining.  Dead TV series like "Dead Like Me" and "Firefly" were also good shows demonstrating honor, intelligence, perseverance, dedication, kindness, and how community works.

We have a few.  We need more.

Early intervention for problems also needs to happen. When a child reports they are being bullied, the adults need to pay attention and see what can be done to reduce or eliminate the bullying, from finding out who is doing the bullying and why to protecting the bullied with adult supervision. Even when I was a child, bullies were always a part of our childhood landscape. But they were often under at least some control. There were limits to their power.  We could count on escaping the bullies if we could reach an adult.

Too many of our children are growing up today knowing they can't depend on anyone else to protect or help them when they most need it - and that makes them bitter timebombs just waiting for the opportunity to exact the revenge for which they shouldn't have to feel a need. Our children need to know that they can depend upon an adult - any adult, every adult - to help them when they are faced with a problem beyond their ability to cope. Bullies need to know they have limits, limits that will be enforced.  Bullies also need to know there is help available for them.  They don't have to do the smaller monkey act.

Perhaps the biggest and most effective change we need to make is to listen.  Listen to our neighbors, friends, family. We need to pay attention to how they feel, what's happening to them, and work to take care of one another long before
anyone has a chance to dwell so long on a hurt that they build the pain or humiliation or terror so far out of proportion the only remedy is violence and death.  We need to hear about the good things, the sad things, the happy, and the hurtful.  We need to listen with sympathy, understanding, and love.  We all need to know that even if we are in the minority, we aren't alone.  Others care about us.  And we care about them.  Maybe all we do is gather in the front yard before or after mowing to chat withour naighbors about small things.  Maybe we have a barbecue or a kaffee klatch with family, friends, neighbors.

We communicate with one another - and that means listening to one another.  We check up on our family and friends and neighbors.  When something changes, we know it and can ask about it, can pay attention and listen and if necessary, offer help before whatever problem is facing them escalates into violence.

When someone can die in their home, and no one knows for a week or more - that's a sad reflection on society. When someone speaks up about a hurt and is ignored for years and the hurt and pain build up until no other alternative is seen except violence - that's a dangerous reflection of a society. It is by paying attention to one another, by caring, and by acting on those caring impulses that we can shift society from the dangerous edge.

One reason the Amish portions of the country have such a low crime rate is because they know one another and they take care of one another. Crime still happens,of course; sometimes extremely violent crime, but it's reduced, and the community gathers together to heal the wounds of the crime.

What do we do when a crime or a disaster happens now? We blame the victim, shun the family as if crime and bad luck were contagious, and we isolate ourselves one from the other. I've been watching how many preachers and public figures say faith must be an absolute. There is no room for doubt, for questioning. When disaster strikes someone, it must be because they doubted. They deserved the damage they suffer for that doubt.

That's not how it should be. We should question. We should doubt. It is in the questions and the doubts and the exploration for answers that we grow connected to others in the world. The isolation that comes from absolute certainty allows no room for love, no room for care, no room for anyone else but oneself. Life is not a contagious disease. Quarantine doesn't keep out the vagaries of life. When one holds absolute certainty that one's Deity will always provide and protect there is no safety net of doubt, no cushion of family and friends, to ease the pain of any kind of setback.  To prove one is beloved of their Deity, one can only destroy others to make sure one is always better off than everyone else.

Absolute certainty is a trap.

Those of us who doubt and question and seek, when we encounter a person of absolute certainty, it isn't envy we feel. It's pity. The life of a person of absolute certainty is filled with things, not people. They measure the love of their Deity by financial success, expensive objects, luxury - and those without those visible markers of wealth must not be worthy of their Deity's love. To keep their Deity's love, they must obey a long list of strict rules, must keep themselves "pure".  They do this by condemning anyone or anything that is outside their narrow limits.  Because they live such rigid lives of utter certainty, they have no room for flexibility, for change, for those who are the smallest bit different. Everything has to be exactly like them or be the enemy.  Without clear-cut black and white certainty, they can't sustain thehmselves and hte illusions they've built around themselves. If someone who is different is happy, the person of utter certainty can only do one of two things:  get more things or console themselves with the knowledge that those happy people will die and burn in their concept of hell.

People who are different can't offer input to the person of utter certainty, because that information is tainted, suspect.

And the reverse is also true - a person of utter certainty can't share with others because that would dilute their purity, their success and happiness and connection with the Divine. That is why when the American people, most of whom are doubters who care and share with one another, were told by the president of the US - a person of utter certainty - that the best thing we could do in the shattered days after 9/11 was to buy more things and present a face of certainty and prosperity, however hollow it was, we were bewildered.  That wasn't a proper, socially positive response to disaster.  It was certainly not hte response to the previous major bombings that happened in America, from the reaction of the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the bombing of the Murrah Building.  The only thing to change between Murrah and 9/11 was that we now had a person of utter certainty as president of hte United States. His administration told us that the appearance of prosperity would bring the real prosperity behind it. Not one of us with doubts could figure out how buying things could help our soldiers or our country. We still can't. That's not a community building and bonding activity. It is what you tell someone when you want them to go away or when you don't believe they can do anything of importance.

That's why the surface of America is one of indifference and even hostility to those who are less fortunate - because that misfortune could contaminate absolute certainty, crack the facade and allow doubt to enter. When the person of utter certainty begins to doubt, their whole life falls apart, for there is no substance to it. They have to destroy what is different so they can regain their absolute certainty once more.

It's not just the ones of absolute certainty who suffer when disaster strikes, or misfortune happens. Without a community cohesiveness, of course violence will increase. The person of absolute certainty doesn't see others as people, only as obstacles or as vampiric entities depriving them of what is rightfully theirs.  Any act of removing goods from others must be a divine act because it punishes the different one and rewards the True Believer.  The methods of removing other people's wealth and goods can be evil because it's the end results that matter, not the methods.  That's why we have "good christians" who commit fraud, rape, pedophilia, theft, murder, abuse, and who support laws and acts that infringe upon the autonomy and freedom of others - and they continue to believe they are "good christians" because they have wealth, comfort, and the love of their Deity.  They have no doubts that whatever they do and however they do it must be right because it is what their Deity wants them to do, or they wouldn't be rich.

When society as a whole doesn't model caring for one another; when the hurt and the damaged seek and are refused validation and help because they aren't "worthy", they will extract what they think they need in any way they can. Look at the Gulf Coast hurricanes from last year - many of the absolute certainty people refused to send aid or offer any sort of help because those who were caught in the hurricanes deserved their fate - they weren't "worthy".If they had been worthy, theywouldn't have been caught in the hurricane.  It was God's punishment for their sins, and if htey helped, they would themselves be sinners - so they couldn't help.  That was reflected so clearly in much of the media coverage, the letters to the editors, blogs, and those "man on the street" interviews. The media and those of utter certainty focused not on the needof the people along the Gulf Coast, but upon the desperation that caused looting - and then used the desperation of the victims of the hurricanes as proof that they weren't worthy of help. When they focused on the looters, they didn't do it with sympathy but with outrage - how dare these people break in to stores and buildings to take water and bread and broken useless electronics!  It assuaged their guilt at not helping, blinkered them to reality - and more than a year later, the devastation of the area remains a testimony to the breakdown in the human compassion divinity gave us.

If the Gulf Coast hurricanes were a test of the American people's faith, then we saw the division lines clearly, those who held doubts about faith and the future, they were the ones who reached out. They helped. And those who were absolutely certain their God would provide did nothing.

I take that back. They heaped scorn and blame upon the victims, calling them criminals, loafers, looters, lazy scumbags not worthy of help or decent human caring.  They publicly and vociferously withheld help.

How many other tests of compassion and caring have we, as a society, failed? The boys at Columbine. The drifter who killed the schoolgirl in Colorado. The man in Pennsylvania. Even the terrorists.  Each of them shed clues about their needs, and we ignored them. These are a mixed bag of people:  those who were absolutely certain their God would provide for them, and the desperate who couldn't get the help they needed. Each of them decided to make a statement in blood - a plea we are still ignoring because the truth of the matter hurts. 

We don't want to fix the problem; we want them to go away.

And if we can make the problem invisible by banning the objects used, like guns and liquids and shoes, and imposing ever greater restrictions upon the innocent and formerly free, so be it. Just so long as we don't have to face any ugly truths and take any difficult action, as a society, we are content.  So long as we have our wealth, we are beloved of our Gods, and need offer no compassion, no understanding, no community feelings to anyone else.  Each of us, insulated by our things and our entertainments, can block out the cries of our families and neighbors because we have what we need, and those others?  They don't deserve it because they don't already have it.

We can't go through life with blinders blocking out unsavory sights, a pomander strapped under our nose to block out bad smells, and earphones blocking any undesirable noises with our hands tightly bound to our sides and our feet shuffling through a deep rut. At some point, we will get jostled, or knocked down, or trip - and then we will see, hear, feel what is happening.

A lot of violence can be averted simply by listening. Banning objects, placing restrictions, imposing curfews, conducting strip searches, making people walk through metal detectors - these things don't work. We've seen they don't work. Yet we keep using these ineffective methods.

Isn't it time we looked to other methods, tried new ones? I offer the methods of kindness, of understanding, of reaching out when the problem is small, so it never grows out of control and ugly. We need to set standards and let others know what our expectations are. We need to band together to enforce them through peer pressure, time-outs, shunning, banishment, punishment - not punitive punishment, but restitutionary punishment. When someone breaks something, they need to apologize for it, have the apology be accepted, and then repair, replace, or in some other way offer compensation for the damage done. And when someone is in need, we as a society, need to reach out and give a helping hand - a hand up that will allow the needy to see their way out of their morass and into a place where they can help themselves and then reach back to help others who are where they once were. The current method of holding people under water until they drown of their need isn't helping anyone.

Pay attention to the world around you. Meet rudeness with civility. Help where you can - and it doesn't have to be expensive or major. Pick up something someone dropped for them, hold a door open without blocking the doorway, look people in the eye and smile. It's the small acts of kindness and caring that will lead to bigger ones.

Too long have we lived under selfishness and "Me first" attitudes and look where it's gotten us.

Let's try something completely different.