me-me-my-my-now

Did you ever have the opportunity to watch a baby chicken hatching? Did you, like me, the first time feel so sorry for the chick that you helped it out of its shell? And then did you watch it die? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Only by allowing the chick to struggle does it gain the strength to live.

For the past several days I have been throwing leftover bread (bagels, English muffins, wheat toast, pizza crust, etc.) into the back yard. Rather than watch it mold, and knowing that it will not be eaten, I had the choice of either bagging the stuff and putting it in the freezer or letting it “do some good.” And so the crows became quite used to visiting my back yard each morning for breakfast. Imagine my surprise when, on day four, even with no more bread for their consumption, they still gathered in the yard and sat expectantly waiting for their handout. Now, crows are not dumb, actually one of the smartest in the avian kingdom. When they had been there for several minutes and no food appeared, they set up a hue and cry, raucous as only crows can be. It took a while for them to decide there were no goodies forthcoming, and they finally flew away en masse.

Recently my friend recommended to me the book “Toxic Charity.” In it, the aspect of focusing on material handouts is explored. It seems we, in our efforts to be the good guys and help those less fortunate than ourselves, actually have created a generation of people who are so dependent on welfare and the kindness of strangers that they have become not only unwilling to work but no longer consider themselves able to work. Getting out and finding a job has become anathema to their mindset, choosing instead to allow others to pay their light bills each month and furnish school uniforms and supplies and meals for their children. I’m not talking about the one-time thing from a parent who was laid off and simply is not capable this year of buying those things – I’m talking about the folks who were admitted to the list one year, and then, every subsequent year, show up at the giveaways rather than budgeting for the expenses they know the children will incur. OK, I’ll admit it, I happen to think school uniforms are a huge mistake, but then, this is my blog and that’s my opinion.

I am also reminded of a charity I was blessed to be a part of several years ago that handed out brown bags to the needy of a certain community. And not just a brown bag with a banana and a sandwich for lunch, but first a nice sit-down breakfast FOLLOWED by grocery-size brown bags containing enough food to get the individual by for a week. I discovered that several of the participants were stopping outside and breaking down the food packets, some taking all of one item, others taking all of another, totally defeating the whole concept of healthy balanced meals planned by our resident nutritionist. A couple of months later, these same participants went to the director and complained that they didn’t like dried beans and felt something else should be substituted. The director patiently listened to the complaint and said, “Ok, we can see about getting a substitute item, what would you recommend?” Well, no one was vocal about what they’d rather have, but with careful questioning the director elicited the response that they didn’t want those old dried beans that you had to soak overnight in water and then spend a few hours cooking; come down to it, they didn’t want food you had to cook at all, they wanted gift certificates to area fast food restaurants.

Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what expanding waistlines and soaring blood pressure counts and diabetic occurrences need – high cholesterol high sodium high sugar empty calorie fast food. Despite the good intentions of the staff, the malcontents soon demanded and got a meeting with the director’s boss, laying out their complaints, and explaining that their wants and needs were simply not in line with the offering of the program. The staff met several times, trying to figure out a way to do exactly what the whiners wanted, but there was just no way. When informed of the decision, one of the unhappy people said they’d get a lawyer and sue the whole shebang, and then they’d see what was what and who was most important. The upshot was that within 6 months the entire program had been shut down. No lawsuit resulted, of course.

The crows flew away. Likewise, the malcontents moved on to greener pastures. And the community, sadly, no longer has an outreach. But that’s just the price of doing business in a me-me-my-my-now-now world.