This Easter I thought I would take a minute to reflect on charitable giving.
The definition of compassion being: a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.
I read all the time about the need for compassion towards others and I wonder why I have no such inclination.
I agree with the definition's beginnings it is the end "a strong desire to alleviate the suffering" where I just end up staring and wondering...
If we learn are to learn from our suffering (and I know I have learned from my own) then would alleviating the suffering of another prevent them from learning the lesson they are called to learn? Would taking away the suffering take away the lesson? If experience is the best teacher, it's because natural consequences are the best punishments.
- John Stein If we give a starving person food, have we taught them how to not be hungry? If the problem still exists after we have provided our 'help', have we helped anyone? Some charities are proud of the fact that they have been providing assistance to the hungry for over 50 years...
which means that multiple generations have grown up in hunger.
Is it any less likely that the progeny of the current generation receiving food will be any more self sufficient? Perhaps a more accurate measure of success should be that the shorter the lifetime of a charity the better? I'm left to wonder: Are we providing support or simply enabling more poverty? And by enabling more poverty are we actually, by our act of giving, increasing suffering? It is plain, to even the more casual observer, that charitable giving has become a growth industry, does that mean that donors should be OK with charitable receipt becoming a growth industry as well?; the more people who need charitable assistance the greater the 'demand' for the product that charities are selling (giving away other people's money).
I'm left to wonder, is this compassion? Or has poverty become a well advertised, well positioned, growth industry by convincing us we are helping and assuaging our guilt with the pictures of those we have "helped".
That is not to say that there aren't those who need our help.
But the question I want to ask is: For how long and can they learn to help themselves to be independent of receiving charity? Who cuts the cord, and when? If our solution to the problem does little more than grow the problem which in turn creates the continual need for more solutions (our solutions), is the business of 'giving', instead of actually alleviating the problem working to exacerbate it? If an organization was created to solve a problem...
what happens when the problem is gone? I'm not saying that the problems aren't real...
I just question our definition of what a solution looks like.
Can't we devise a better solution to poverty, hunger and disease than just throwing money at it? Money, I should add, that often is used to line the pockets of third world thieves posing as politicians.
Speaking of politicians (a word which many feel is a synonym for thieves), it was in 1966 that Lyndon Johnson launched the "War on Hunger".
After almost 50 years of this war can we now say that the world is better fed?