Random Acts of Generosity: Spitting in the Wind or Casting Bread on the Water?

This past Friday, I kicked off my birthday weekend. Here are some highlights of the transition into my 56^th year: I baked three cakes and gave two of them away; I gave away three lunch bags, each to a homeless stranger (one was a veteran who had served in Iraq); I wrote three letters, each one to someone with whom I had not been in touch with for some time.

I seldom talk about the things I do for others; I really believe that the things you do secretly for others makes it more about them. But today is my birthday, and I have decided to make confessions.

For many months, if not the past several years, there has been a sense of unease growing inside me, mainly resulting from the quickly growing economic disparity within my community. Throughout the region, the numbers of homeless have grown. Housing for many is threatened by decreases in availability and increases in cost, while wages have been stagnant in most sectors except tech, banking, property development, and a few others. The drum is beaten against the sensibility of tying minimum wage to a cost of living index; even at a rate $15 an hour, who can survive on it?

There is unrest; there is violence; there is anger.

During the 1960s, when I was a kid, there was a “can do” attitude. There was a notion that we could tackle problems like illiteracy and hunger and solve them. Not only could they be solved here at home, but throughout the world. People were committed to this notion.

What happened?

The simple answer is greed happened. Institutions of all shapes, sizes and purposes have been carved out. Corporate stockholders are less likely to invest, more likely to sell off. Municipality, transit and utility boards have been deferring maintenance for decades, so that people at the top can make more and more money. The centralizing, commodifying, chartering and privatizing of everything is squeezing our institutions for every dime possible, while delivering their missions less sustainably and reliably. The so-called “sharing” and “gig” economies are merely code words that mean “we can’t make it with one job alone.”

Humanity bought capitalism and capitalism is failing humanity.

All of this makes me angry. My family struggles to make more and more money, and we have much, much less. And we look around and see that we are not alone in the struggle.

Of the issue of homelessness, people are quick to say that millions and millions of dollars have been applied to solve it and have not done a thing. “Spending money on homelessness is like spitting in the wind” is a sentence I have actually seen in the editorial pages of my regional newspaper. This is too frequently an excuse to do nothing, or worse, to criminalize vagrancy. “If we must have homelessness, I don’t want to see it” is the attitude.

So the can is kicked down the line to the next generation.

People, this just will not do.

But it is my birthday – this is my party. I could “cry if I want to”, as the lyrics from Lesley Gore’s 1963 song suggest, but I’m not going to do that.

I am going to live more audaciously, as the sermon I heard last night invited (thank you, Rabbi Judy Shanks!). That impulse to brazenly, if in haste, pack some food into flimsy lunch bags and hand it out my car window when encountering someone in need – I want to live like that, casting what bits of bread I have on the water, sharing it with a stranger.

The truth is that each of us has the world; we don’t need more than that. But what we possess, we must responsibility to uphold and steward. There is plenty, if we will but share. But this giving, we have to do it, we have to live that, every day.

Today is my birthday (and the birthday of the world!). It’s my party, and I declare it’s our party, and I invite you all to join me, in whatever way you can.

What you will do? How will you cast your bread on the water? What random acts of generosity will you perpetrate?

– Wait, don’t tell me. Let it be a surprise!

Everyperson, Equal Access and Perpetual War Economy

Justice is a loaded word. Everyone wants justice, even if they don’t know all the meanings and implications of the word, as if it is a product that can be purchased. Mostly, when people use the term justice, they are referencing it from the standpoint of equitable treatment and equal access. The democratic essence of our American republic is founded on the notion of such an equality.

And yet, justice, in this sense of equality, is not a reality, only a dream and a political buzz word.

Everyday, when I relate some mundane happening, and how it affected me, I hear reflected back from others, “oh, yes—that happened to me a while ago. I know how you feel.” And I believe those persons do have an idea how I feel. And when others tell me their stories, I believe I know how they feel. We are all unique individuals, but we also share the same capacities for existential experience, the same needs and feelings, the same desire for recognition, inclusion, acceptance, exchange, respect and dignity. If you have ever met anyone who does not share these things with you, I would love to hear about it. I have never met anyone who is other than me or you, in these respects. One could generalize: we are each an Everyperson, and we are each stymied in some aspect of acquiring justice, as in equality, that ideal everyone talks about so vividly.

Too bad there is no such thing as justice. Oh, yes, justice could be attained or enacted or even enforced where it has been enacted. Justice is possible; but there are some persons who do not believe that Everyperson should have it. There are some persons who don’t believe that Everyperson should believe in anything, behave in any fashion, or appear in any way other than do they. There are some persons who will pretend that others do not share the same capacities for existential experience as they have. And some of those persons won’t allow others the same access to the good things in life that they themselves possess, even if what they have is so much that it could not possibly be used up.

When We the Everypersons ask for equal access to healthcare, for example, we are continually rebuffed by folks who tell us that this is not possible because it is too expensive and there is not enough money. How facile that response! It has been suggested by various organizations that the entire amount of the annual budget of the U.S. Department of Defense, not even including the nuclear weapons program, could provide clean water, access to healthcare and food for the entire world. And yet, we are led to believe this money is best spent perpetuating wars that bring anything but justice, or peace, to the places where they are waged.

I would suggest that if money were invested in people, that is Everyperson, rather than weapons—for the cultivation of healthy food, the provision of basic housing, the assurance that drinking water is clean and available, the insuring, not underwriting, of access to healthcare delivery—“that war would be no more”, in the words of the beloved spiritual.

Yes, I know, my argument is facile also. I know that I cannot convince the world’s wealthiest persons or their lobbyists or their muscle or their bought-and-paid-for politicians that this is the heart of justice; what I suggest comes between them and their right to do business. But the truth is, there is no shortage of money; there is more than enough money, indeed, there are persons who have more money than they know what to do with—there is plenty of money with which to do all the wrong things, such as parting Everypersons unjustly and inequitably from their earnings as often and soon as possible, with little redress from any governing body that should provide oversight and protection in such matters, and polluting the planet with toxic garbage and nuclear weapons.

Why can't all this money be spent on the right things? Not only would it be better spent, but I think it would be cheaper than all this other nonsense. And there would be so many more hero/ines that we could venerate!

Change will only occur when there is a willingness on the part of those few persons, controlling the majority of the money, to accept the validity and equality and rights of Everyperson to those of themselves. When their actions speak otherwise, as they do everyday when millions of Everypersons are denied access to the basic protections, much less the basic quality of life necessities, it seems clear that these other persons particularly want a world full of illiterate, impoverished, starving and dying people to control.

This is injustice.

This is unthinkable.

But I ask you to think on it, particularly while you are preparing to vote in the upcoming election.

I also commend to you the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

And check out the PowerPoint presentation at www.miniature-earth.org