Tag Archives: charity

America’s Values Are Competing With Our Desires

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Years back, I was wandering down Powell Street in San Francisco. If you’re not aware of the nuances of San Francisco, Powell Street serves as the Bart connection for most people in the corridor between downtown and the financial district. When the homeless situation started to get out of control in the city, you would expect this corridor would also serve as their hangout as well.

I remember a couple of suits walking down the street when one of the homeless confronted them, asking for money. One of the men seemed flabbergasted that one of the city’s homeless had addressed him and turned to his friend for encouragement after he cursed at the homeless guy. His friend turned back to him and said, not even waiting to take a breath: “When did people become so callous towards other people?”

I’ve often remembered that conversation because I think it was the last time that I heard someone actually evoke concern for those living on the street. Oh, sure, I’ve heard aid organizations talk about needing to help the homeless, but that was the last time I heard it said out loud by someone on the street. Nowadays, if someone tends to see a homeless person, or any person in need, I see them avoid that person, even to the point of crossing the street, if that will help avoid that encounter.

Yesterday, in the New York Times, there was an article about how the heat wave has been affecting Texas. I figured it was probably getting hot in a number of states, but they also reported that 10 people had died in Texas the other day, all because they didn’t have access to air conditioners. I seriously thought about driving to Lowe’s and buy ten air conditioners and drive them to Laredo, TX, the place where the 10 had died. And then I read more. Some of them had air conditoners but were scared to turn them on because of the prohibitive cost. The others just couldn’t afford air conditioners and roasted in their homes with air fans on, not realizing that it just wouldn’t be enough.

But here’s what caused me to want to write this article: Tano Tijerina, the county judge for Webb County (where Laredo exists) said about handing out air conditioners to citizens: “If you’re going to start giving out air conditioners, where do you stop?” he said. “We are an aid, we will help, we’ll assist.” But he added, “we’re talking about people’s tax dollars here.”

And that’s the problem right there. It’s a problem that has been growing for about as long as the United States has been a country.

You see, before the U.S. came along, most countries were monarchies or empires, and it was through their benevolence that they bestowed charity upon those they ruled over. When we came along, we promised to be a rule of the people, for the people and by the people. If you unpack that, what we promised was that our government would be ruled by the people and that those people would take care of the rest of the people.

But notice, that promise didn’t come from the original founding fathers, even if they might have meant it. Those words didn’t come into a hundred years after our nation was formed, from a speech given by Abraham Lincoln, detailing a new America after the Civil War. While his intention may have been that no people should be enslaving other people, he also meant that people with means should look after those who have needs.

And for many years, the country has moved in that general direction, but throughout all of those times, there has always been a group of people with resources who have tried to stand in the way of helping anyone who has needed assistance. Years back, they argued that people should lift themselves up by their bootstraps, even though those of means rarely ever had to lift any bootstraps; they were lifted long ago by families that were rich that allowed them to inherit immense wealth.

Throughout our history, whenever those in power have tried to give a lift to those in need, there has been that swift boot of injustice that tries to intercede and stop it from happening. During the Depression, when many were destitute, there were those who had wealth that did everything to stop FDR from enacting programs to help those in need. They used the Supreme Court to stop every move FDR made. And then FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court, which caused the very rich to realize that all of the gains they had achieved from a favorable Supreme Court might end, so the Supreme Court allowed FDR’s reforms to go through.

So, why am I talking about something nearly a century ago? Because those people never went away. Oh, sure, they’re different people, but they are acting in the same ways their fathers and grandfathers did. That county judge shows us that those people are still around.

What’s important to think about is what do we consider to be important to the American system of values? On one hand, we have those people who honestly believe that profit is more important than the well-being of our fellow citizens. We’ve been fighting this battle as long as most of us have been alive. It’s so convoluted that at times those with wealth have figured out ways to pitch the fights between groups of people without anything, so that the majority of the attention is spent on irrelevant fights while those with everything laugh while they’re counting their money.

As long as citizens of the United States care more for money than they do their fellow citizens, the point of the United States is irrelevant. We could be any location on the planet and it wouldn’t mean a single thing. People sailed to this country in hopes of starting a new and wondrous life. They didn’t do it because there was new land across the ocean. They risked their lives for something greater than that.

And for centuries, that’s just what we offered them. Now, not so much.

And that concerns me.

It’s not really charity if you want credit for your giving

Business, Economics, Healthcare, Memoirs, , , , , , , , ,

Years ago, I used to work for a hotel that loved good publicity. It would volunteer for neighborhood “giving” things, and then recruits its employees to provide the ground work for what needed to happen. And then it would release a big press release about how much that hotel was doing for the community.

One of the employee “perks” of working for that large hotel chain was that on every Thanksgiving the hotel would give a turkey to each employee before that holiday. It was a nice thing, and if you had a family, or could cook a turkey, it was probably a great benefit. I worked for that company for seven years, and five years in I realized that each year they gave away a turkey, I never took one because I basically had no family and no way to actually cook it. So, it would have been a waste of food. But on that fifth year, I had a new idea. I was going to give my turkey to a food shelter so other people could benefit from the free item I was given.

As I told other people about this, I started to discover how many people didn’t have families of their own, and how many of them turned down the turkey each year on Thanksgiving because they had nothing to do with it. So, they started asking me if they could give their turkeys to me and then have me donate them to the food shelter I was going to give mine to. In a few short days, I had the promise of 25 turkeys from random people at work who told other people who then contacted me. When the givaway occurred, I realized I had a bit of a problem because I really had no ability to carry 25 turkeys home with me, or any place to store them for several days before I would be able to deliver them. So, I contacted one of the main kitchen executives, and he gave me access to a freezer for the time being so I could store this bounty.

Then I got onto the phone and started calling food banks, before realizing that unless you’re a “donor” they know, they’re sometimes not all that interested in someone giving them free food. Finally, I found a San Francisco food kitchen that was in desperate need of this sort of thing, and I arranged to deliver it to them.

The day I pulled up my station wagon to the loading dock to load all of these turkeys, I was met in the loading dock by a minion from the human resources department., She wanted to know what I was doing with all of these turkeys. After I explained it to her, she indicated that these turkeys were for employees, and that I had no permission from the hotel to be doing what I was doing. I explained that these turkeys were given to me by employees who wanted them to go to some place where they would be of use. She was adamant that this had to be approved by higher ups. The guys in the loading dock ignored her and loaded up my car with the turkeys and then allowed me to leave. When I returned to work on Monday morning, I was subsequently written up by someone in human resources for subordination, which ended up being dissolved after a union rep was brought in to dispute the charge.

The next year, no less than 40 people approached me about donating turkeys, even though I didn’t even say I was going to do it that year. As I started coordinating the activity, another person from human resources had me called into her office where she explained to me that if it wasn’t a hotel function, designed by hotel HR, then it was not my option to do. I explained that these turkeys were given to employees, which meant they could do anything they waned with them. She explained that if the hotel wasn’t getting credit for its charity, then I was to cease this activity immediately. I said no, as this wasn’t really her choice to make. We never came to an agreement.

I stopped working there the next year and went back to school, but let’s just say that it taught me an important lesson when it comes to HR and corporations. I’ll let you figure out what that lesson was.

Fast forward to now, and I now work for a hospital system that loves its publicity (sound familiar). It constantly reveals how loved it is in the community to which it serves, and it often calls on its employees to make it appear even better. An example I find eye-opening is its yearly United Way campaign. Every year, expensively produced materials are given to every employee to assist them in making the maximum contribution they can. What I find interesting is that one of the very attractive women I work with who NEVER speaks to me on a daily basis, actually starts speaking to me right before she approaches me to “give” to the United Way campaign because she is the department’s spokesperson and her success in getting signatures is part of how she is perceived to management.

Now, I have personal problems with the United Way that are irrelevant to the discussion, but let’s just say that due to my experiences with them, I do not contribute to them. I do contribute to other places. Just not them. But the place where I work feels it is important for maximum contributions and consistently overplays how important it is that each employee contribute. One such appeal came the other day from a corporate VP who felt that employees weren’t giving enough, so he was opening up the time to give for longer than originally planned. All I kept thinking was “you know, this guy makes so much money that he could probably make up the need that he wants all by himself, but I bet he’s not interested because he’s only giving a certain amount that will be represented by a certain percentage of what he can claim on his taxes this year.” Or something like that.

When this whole campaign is over, the place where I work will claim victory and won’t actually say “Our employees were so great because they gave this much money to the United Way.” Instead, the expensively printed materials will indicate that the place where I work reached its goals and provided a certain amount of money to the United Way. Again, it may just be semantics, but those semantics are why I tend to avoid corporate giving in most instances. It’s almost always about the corporation, not about the people who work for that organization. Sure, they’ll have a nice little memo that goes out to the employees, but when it comes to the real recognition, they’ll take full credit and bask in the glory.

That’s why I say it’s not really charity if you want credit for your giving. When I gave away those turkeys, the recipient who off loaded them wanted to know who she should give credit, even trying to figure out who to make out  receipt, and I just stared at her dumbfounded, revealing that I did it because people were hungry and I had extra food. What more needed to be said than that?

Schools have become much more dangerous yet politicians are arguing about abortion

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Another student at a high school brought a shotgun to school and killed another student. The week before, some other student decided to air out his grievances using guns against random strangers. A short while before that, yet another gunman brought guns to a Batman premiere and erupted in violence there.

What’s going on these days? Why have people in Random Town, USA showing up with guns and killing people for whatever twisted reasons they can concoct at that particular moment?

When I went to high school, I remember being scared for my life at times, but that was because I went to Santa Monica High School (my first year) and there were violent gangs that were quickly taking over the outskirts of campus. Even so, campus was considered somewhat safe; it was just dangerous when you walked off campus, including the one time I got mugged for $15 by an entire gang of black street thugs (who also happened to be students at my school). Back then, the gangs fought amongst themselves (black gangs versus Hispanic gangs, but slowly the rest of us were being singled out for violence by these carefree criminals living in our society. Things were getting worse, but they hadn’t reached the point where I think they’ve become today.

Keep in mind, I went to school in a large city, where that kind of violence seemed to become the norm. But what we’re seeing now is violence on an unscaled comparison that is taking place in those communities where news stories begin with: “And we never imagined such a thing might happen here.”

Yet, the politicians in this country, all running for office, seem mostly interested in talking about abortion and other inane topics that really have no relevance to the majority of people on a daily basis.

I’m sorry, but abortion is a fringe topic, and while some people may find it significant as an issue, that’s one of those things that really needs to be decided between people who are faced with that issue, not by every fly by night politician who wants to pretend to be an advocate for family values or some other nonsense. What has happened is that it has become one of those issues that appears to have meaning but is really smoke, mirrors and air. It’s like saying you’re against crime. We’re all against crime. But that doesn’t make the issue go away. Abortion is a lot like that because the real issue shouldn’t be about abortion; it should be about the causes of prenancy, because THAT is the issue that progressives and fundamentalists are REALLY arguing over. They just don’t want to admit it. Instead, they make grandiose gestures about saving lives (either the unborn child or the life of the mother), when in reality both sides are really wanting to be arguing about promiscuity and free choice decisions for men and women. It’s just so much easier to go the other direction with the argument.

In reality, conservatives have a great opportunity to punish a woman for her “promiscuity” by taking away her rights to decide for herself what is best for her and/or the child she may or may not have. On the other side, the progressives argue that it’s about free choice, when it’s free choice that got the particular couple into the mess in the first place.

In other words, there’s no real easy answer to the children issue, and trying to “solve” it gives a great opportunity to ignore that the REAL issues of America can’t be solved either. And I’m talking about crime and poverty. Because if you trace all of the problems that seem to come into the disagreements, THOSE TWO are the issues that fuel pretty much everything else.

If there was no poverty, there would be no need for crime (other than just crazy people doing crazy things). But poverty leads people to do all sorts of things that they wouldn’t normally do, right or wrong. Then we have to allocate resources to stopping them, putting them in prison, and maybe even trying to rehabilitate them. Without poverty, you probably wouldn’t even have an abortion issue, because even if conservatives got everything they wanted, every child could be born and put into adoption. But that rarely happens today because quite a few poor women who have children have all sorts of problems that stem from the fact that they’re poor. Pushing aside the obvious desire of a mother to keep her child, there’s also the possibility that the child is going to be born with problems because of the fact of poverty that existed when the mother was pregnant. There is drug use, crime infested areas and abuse issues that are inherent in a lot of these cases. In some cases, a mother may not have access to any of the services she needs because a) she may not even realize the services are available because no one ever told her they might be, b) she may be in a home situation that forces her into making decisions that she doesn’t want to make but lives in an environment where she really doesn’t have the freedom to make choices like she should be able to (either through an oppressive partner or any number of other factors, and c) she may have access to nothing to help her, including information. Some areas see the indigent as problems and have very little desire to assist them.

I’ll give you a good example. Me. My mother was uneducated and forced to work in very low-paying jobs in the 1960s. She had few skills, which meant she wasn’t capable of doing a lot of things. She probably should have aborted me or sent me off for adoption as that would have probably increased her survival. She already had a teenage daughter at the time I arrived. Yet, she didn’t do that, and we lived through some very harsh times. And she died very early as a result of destructive diseases that took her down fast. Had I not been around, there’s a pretty good chance that things might not have been so bad for her. For most of her life, whenever she attempted to access governmental benefits, she was turned down and sent away. Instead, we went without, a lot.

Poverty is probably the one basic factor behind why most of the problems exist in America today. Yet, we do absolutely nothing to alleviate it, other than flash in the pan treatments that only continue to make things limp on as they have before. We’ve done more to eradicate poverty and hunger in other countries than we have in our own country, somehow relying on charities at home as a solution that has never actually solved anything.

But this whole conversation started as a discussion about random violence at schools and in our communities. On the surface, poverty and those events may not seem related, but they are. You see, violence brought on by poverty has fueled a thought process amongst the youth over the last few generations where the belief is that in order to achieve what you need, it may take violence and guns to do it. I mentioned before that one day when I was mugged walking home from school in Santa Monica. Shortly after that, I started imagining what I could have done if I had had a gun that day. I realized I might not have been a victim, but I could have gotten the upperhand and killed a bunch of them before they ever stole from me again.

Fortunately, that moment never came, and fortunately I channeled a lot of that aggression into a military career instead. Today, I don’t feel the same way as I used to, prone to moments of nonviolence rather than the other way around.

But I can see how years of this kind of institutional abuse would start people down a path that makes more sense to them than might have made sense years earlier to a previous generation. And meanwhile, we’re watching the gladiators perform in the coliseum while Rome burns, wondering why its getting so hot.

Young, Pretty Texas Girl Reminds Us All That Sometimes People are Greedy Sh**heads

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When I heard about this story, I was both shocked and awed, even though I keep telling myself over and over that nothing really can shock and awe me anymore. Well, I was wrong.

Young teen, Angie Ramirez, galvanized support for her battle with leukemia that she’s been struggling with most of her life. With only six months to live, she put out a call for help from all of the rest of us, and respond we did (with about $17,000 of supported donations). Well, as it turns out, a funny thing happened on the way to leukemia. You see, little Angie Ramirez, who is 18 years old now, doesn’t actually have leukemia. Her charity she created, The Dream Foundation, really only had one dream being fulfilled, and it appears that dream was to help a young, attractive girl make a shitload of money off of gullible people.

Now, having said all that, maybe she has leukemia, but detectives in Texas certainly don’t think so. And neither does the hospital where she claims she lived most of her sick childhood (turns out, they never heard of her). Maybe it’s all a paperwork mix-up. I don’t know. But it doesn’t sound very good from what I’ve read and heard so far.

But look at her picture. She’s cute. And I’m sure a whole lot of people saw a cute little girl who was suffering and really felt she was worth trying to help. But because of her, how many people who might have helped other people are probably going to think it’s not worth it because if they were fooled once, they figure they’re probably being lied to again.

In this country, we have Ponzi schemers who completely get away with their crimes, go to prison for a few years, and then come out richer than God. When you’ve got guys like Bernie Madoff, whose family then argues that it “deserves” some of the money that he bilked people out of because they have mouths to feed, you just shake your head and realize that there has to be a reason people feel they can, and should, get away with this kind of crap. Whether it’s bad rearing or a society that believes that winning is more important than anything else, including morals and laws, this kind of stuff is happening way too often. It’s getting to the point where whenever I hear a sob story about how someone is suffering for some reason, my spidey senses start tingling, and I figure that they’re probably full of crap.

The other day, I was reading a forum posting on a community site I have been part of for over a decade now, and a known person talked about some horrific things that have happened in her life recently, and she was asking for the community’s support. Now, I’ve known of this person for a very long time, and instead of immediately think “wow, let’s try to help her”, I started thinking of people like Madoff and this scum teen who cheated people out of their charity, and I immediately don’t want to help her. And there’s probably no reason to suspect a scam, yet the incidents of this nature make it so that I don’t trust anyone any longer.

That’s what this kind of stuff leads to, and it bothers me a lot because I’m still naive enough to believe that people should help people whenever they can. But when charity is treated as another income source, what future is there for people who hold out hope for humanity?

(Picture attributed to Ruben Ramirez/AP)