I left this as a comment at Northern Insights:
http://northerninsights.blogspot.ca/2012/12/fraying-of-social-safety-nets.html
Long ago, it dawned on me that charity was a way for people who had taken too much to organize the rest of society into giving time, goods and money to fill the gaps left by their own accumulations of wealth and power. This became particularly and painfully evident in some of the early rounds of trashing the contracts of health workers at the dawn of the BC Liberals new economic paradigm for BC, where the Salvation Army became a contractor taking over various services with stripped contracts, while at the same time holding onto large reserves of cash and property. In a sign of the irony of charities engaging in business, it was about this time that the SA became a listed entity on the NASDAQ: I’ll leave the religious niceties to others, but it was emblematic of the whole charity industry, where many good people work their hearts out in the service of outsourcing the principal business of society: making life livable for all, but whose efforts ultimately serve the desires of a small, greedy and uncaring minority. The rise of food banks in the early ’80s seemed like a lovely gesture, but the fact that they have become such a fixture and are so burdened with a constant stream of new clientèle and a reduced donor base speaks volumes for the direction that governance has taken at all levels of society. The sad part is that it is very difficult find productive outlets for effort and money to address the root causes of poverty and inequality because politics and the judiciary have been compromised and the public in general is held in thrall to a game of governance where there is no ethical choice: our collective ignorance perpetuates a fear-based participation in a vicious cycle of limited choices and no clear path to true social investment. The whole of an economy based on growth and consumption produces a soul-stealing inequality where those who “have” are driven to accumulate for fear of becoming one of those who “have not”, this dispossessed and disenfranchised whose designated image is that of social discard. I know people who are sponges, welfare bums and leeches, but they are few in relation to the overall ranks of strugglers, who, like most of us, need only a realistic opportunity to make a contribution to become constructive members of a larger community. Even one who writes very bad poetry or makes very bad music is less of a drain on society and the environment than someone who plies the same trade in aid of advertising campaigns to encourage further consumption, yet the Madison Avenue copywriters and jingle composers are well remunerated while we scrape to help look after those deprived of opportunity and a decent living. This rather long-winded diatribe hardly scratches the surface, and doesn’t deal with the pillage of resources outside out borders, thinking of Fantino’s recent pronouncements about how Canadian aid overseas should work, but even without looking outside our own house, there is enough of a pall to incite us to some form of constructive action beyond supporting charities of any stripe.
I saw this over at Libération this morning (not available to non-subscribers and not really accessible to those who don’t read French): the title says most of what we need to know and most of us can fill in the blanks. Pardon the substandard translations (I haven’t read a cereal box for decades)
«Respectés, les gens veulent s’en sortir»
When people are respected, they want to get back in the game.
Prix imbattables contre suivi individuel. L’épicerie sociale de Saint-Flour, dans le Cantal, cherche à rompre avec la «politique du don».
Unbeatable prices versus individual attention. The social grocery of Saint-Flour, in the Cantal, looks to break from the “policy of donations”.
For subscribers to Libération, the URL is:
http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2012/12/09/respectes-les-gens-veulent-s-en-sortir_866365
And, for interest’s sake, here is a perspective piece from Rafe Mair’s site:
http://thecanadian.org/item/1840-the-surrender-of-an-ecowarrior
My mother died an activist, as did my father ( some time earlier: he missed the last decade of accelerating devastation both in the ecosphere and the sociosphere). I hope I have the cussedness to do the same.
