Reply #55: that is fine [View All]

[Two Americas]

But what you are describing is President Bush's "thousand points of light" program, and what others are describing is President Reagan's "bootstrap" program, and W's "faith-based initiative" program - privatized charity, presented as the ultimate solution to social problems.

I am very saddened to hear the story of your brother - so very sorry, Egerton.

I don't think any of us are saying that charity is bad. I have spent thousands and thousands of hours working in elder care over the decades in the most impoverished neighborhoods, as well as massive fund raising efforts for shelters, battered women outreach programs, orphans and abused children, leader dog programs and many other charities.

I would be very surprised if anyone here has put in anything close to the hours that I have in the most difficult charity work in the worst situations. Not that this matters - the point is not to say what a wonderful person I am - the point is that the opinions I am expressing are not offered instead of doing private charity work, they are the product of thousands of hours of charity work, and those are not merely the usual perfunctory things organized for volunteers, but rather the hundreds of hours of independent and hands on work that doesn't make stories in the media or have happy endings or gold stars awarded to the volunteers.

And clearly, articles such as this are people's feel good for the day, because they get very angry and call people "negative" and "nay sayers" and "downers" and "jerks" when they try to expand the scope of the conversation into a broader discussion and to move us away from the right wing political model for addressing charity.

Poverty is a political challenge - as people on the political left that is how we should always see social issues - and all we are trying to do here is to talk about this in a political context. Anyone who has been involved in charity work in any capacity beyond the most superficial volunteer work knows that it is a political battle, and also knows that much volunteer charity work is premised upon ignoring and avoiding political realities because the political work is the hard work and the dangerous work.