helping others, dependency?
[...]
A few years ago... our local newspaper carried a story headlined “Panhandler Concerns Residents.” It seems that every day, a man stood...holding a sign reading “Hungry.” Many residents complained to the selectmen... When the topic came up at the next selectmen’s meeting, the chairman asked, “What are you going to do, arrest him and give him a meal?”
Sixty years ago, that would have been precisely the response to a hungry vagrant in small-town New Hampshire. He would have been taken to the jail if there was one, to an inn or a home if there wasn’t, and there he’d be fed. Thirty years ago, a local official might even have helped him sign up for food stamps or welfare. But now, feeding a hungry man would seem to be trouble waiting to happen, for [another selectman] advised the townspeople, “The best way to avoid the problem is not to give out free food.”
...To be sure, common morality still calls for feeding a hungry man, yet today, when I tell this story and ask audiences what they think the selectman meant, everyone seems to know. It’s as if I’d asked a kindergarten class the color of the sky.
* “If you give out free food, the man will just keep coming back for more.”
* “Other poor people will come to the town, knowing that there’s free food.”
* “If you help him, you’re just enabling him.”
These answers pretty well summarize the new conventional wisdom: “Help is harmful. Think twice before you do it, and do it with restraint.”
Aha, I think: there’s the true chasm that my aunt and I were bickering across that day, the yawning gap between our two different poles of belief. She believes that help should be given judiciously to those in need, so as not to compound the problem-the “problem” being that, in her eyes, people ask for help when they don’t really need it, or when they’ve grown dependent on the help of others.
I’ve worked in enough soup kitchens, mental health clinics, and Habitat for Humanity sites to believe something different: most people ask for help only when they’re so trapped by their need that they’re willing to exchange a piece of their dignity by calling attention to it. I’ve come to believe that most people will ask for help only as long as they need it, and-moreover-that giving is helpful to both the recipient and the giver: in helping, in giving, we come to see and appreciate our own resources more deeply. There’s a vast expanse between being responsible with our resources and fearfully hoarding what we have, attributing others with greed or laziness when their resources run thin.
Here’s another way of defining our respective views of the world: my aunt’s experience is funneled through scarcity metaphors: life is comprised of stockholders, “zero-sum games and pies with only so many slices”-a mentality Stone[2] calls “mine-or-thine.” In contrast (and on a day when my personal angels aren’t off galavanting somewhere else), I see life moving in metaphors of abundance, “continuity, circular flows, and widening ripples...mine-and-thine.”
Why are we called to give of ourselves? When my car and I are idling at the exit ramp, it might be prudent to ask myself, “Is this guy really homeless? What will he do with this money? Does he really need help?” I’d hate to waste a dollar, after all-right? After careful consideration, it’s a gamble I’m willing to take, more often than not. I would rather hand him a dollar bill than sit with the uncomfortable grain of knowledge that I looked away from someone declaring himself in need. What, after all, is the true cost of purposefully looking through, or past, someone who’s asking for help? When I pretend not to see another human being, it exacts a steeper cost-a dram of my soul-than a measly dollar.
[...]
Source:
Today's Sermon: The Answer I Wish I'd Given!
by Erika A. Hewitt, Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Goleta, CA
Monday, July 6, 2009.
http://uua.org/spirituallife/9136.shtml
A few years ago... our local newspaper carried a story headlined “Panhandler Concerns Residents.” It seems that every day, a man stood...holding a sign reading “Hungry.” Many residents complained to the selectmen... When the topic came up at the next selectmen’s meeting, the chairman asked, “What are you going to do, arrest him and give him a meal?”
Sixty years ago, that would have been precisely the response to a hungry vagrant in small-town New Hampshire. He would have been taken to the jail if there was one, to an inn or a home if there wasn’t, and there he’d be fed. Thirty years ago, a local official might even have helped him sign up for food stamps or welfare. But now, feeding a hungry man would seem to be trouble waiting to happen, for [another selectman] advised the townspeople, “The best way to avoid the problem is not to give out free food.”
...To be sure, common morality still calls for feeding a hungry man, yet today, when I tell this story and ask audiences what they think the selectman meant, everyone seems to know. It’s as if I’d asked a kindergarten class the color of the sky.
* “If you give out free food, the man will just keep coming back for more.”
* “Other poor people will come to the town, knowing that there’s free food.”
* “If you help him, you’re just enabling him.”
These answers pretty well summarize the new conventional wisdom: “Help is harmful. Think twice before you do it, and do it with restraint.”
Aha, I think: there’s the true chasm that my aunt and I were bickering across that day, the yawning gap between our two different poles of belief. She believes that help should be given judiciously to those in need, so as not to compound the problem-the “problem” being that, in her eyes, people ask for help when they don’t really need it, or when they’ve grown dependent on the help of others.
I’ve worked in enough soup kitchens, mental health clinics, and Habitat for Humanity sites to believe something different: most people ask for help only when they’re so trapped by their need that they’re willing to exchange a piece of their dignity by calling attention to it. I’ve come to believe that most people will ask for help only as long as they need it, and-moreover-that giving is helpful to both the recipient and the giver: in helping, in giving, we come to see and appreciate our own resources more deeply. There’s a vast expanse between being responsible with our resources and fearfully hoarding what we have, attributing others with greed or laziness when their resources run thin.
Here’s another way of defining our respective views of the world: my aunt’s experience is funneled through scarcity metaphors: life is comprised of stockholders, “zero-sum games and pies with only so many slices”-a mentality Stone[2] calls “mine-or-thine.” In contrast (and on a day when my personal angels aren’t off galavanting somewhere else), I see life moving in metaphors of abundance, “continuity, circular flows, and widening ripples...mine-and-thine.”
Why are we called to give of ourselves? When my car and I are idling at the exit ramp, it might be prudent to ask myself, “Is this guy really homeless? What will he do with this money? Does he really need help?” I’d hate to waste a dollar, after all-right? After careful consideration, it’s a gamble I’m willing to take, more often than not. I would rather hand him a dollar bill than sit with the uncomfortable grain of knowledge that I looked away from someone declaring himself in need. What, after all, is the true cost of purposefully looking through, or past, someone who’s asking for help? When I pretend not to see another human being, it exacts a steeper cost-a dram of my soul-than a measly dollar.
[...]
Source:
Today's Sermon: The Answer I Wish I'd Given!
by Erika A. Hewitt, Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Goleta, CA
Monday, July 6, 2009.
http://uua.org/spirituallife/9136.shtml