Giving Thanks by Helping Others : Today begins the season to be charitable
Let’s face it: 1993 has been another downer of a year economically. More than any other region of the country, Southern California is hurting. Unemployment is higher than elsewhere and many companies have been compelled by circumstances to trim their sails.
Many other places, too, have their problems. The Japanese yen machine has been sputtering; even the German economy is ailing, suffering from a bad case of undigested reunification. The result, almost all over the world, is political trouble for incumbent governments. “In a worldwide recession,” as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once put it drolly, “people tend to be unhappy.”
But an individual’s Unhappiness Index, in this blue year of 1993, must be put into perspective. Does one still have a job? Is the mortgage payment or rent still being made? Is there food on the table? Is the family healthy?
Answer “yes” to these questions and it must be said that one is doing very well--indeed, that one’s Christmas has come early. That’s because many of our fellow citizens are nowhere close to that level of comfort. Too many have not only lost their jobs but their homes as well, and are struggling to get it together to begin the long, hard climb back up the ladder. Too many children have been abandoned by their parents, or left to roam the streets with their mothers in a brutal struggle for survival.
Years ago--many, many years ago, fortunately--it was conventional wisdom that the poor were poor because of some defect of character and therefore there was little that could be done for them. But then came the Great Depression--and Americans realized that people could become poor, homeless and destitute through no fault of their own. That’s not true of all the homeless and poor, of course, but for many of them the economic system can fail. We know that now.
That was the origin of the substantial safety net that is one of America’s proudest contributions to economic justice. But here and there the safety net has holes and some fall through it.
That’s where the rest of us come in--the people who are finding things tight but haven’t fallen through the bottom of the economy. It is to us that the burden of charity becomes a huge, overwhelming moral obligation; it is to us that the homeless mother and her child turn for help, through the many wonderful charitable organizations in Southern California that do so much with so little.
Bring some comfort to the afflicted, bring some sunshine to those who have only rain in their lives. Give a little or give a lot, but do give to whatever charity you favor. Because through your charity human suffering is eased. And there is very little in life that one can do that is more consequential than that.
