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[rinue]

Watching a Clinton Global Initiative event, it occurred to me that every month, there's at least one story about Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter doing something amazing, something that saves lives, gives dignity, creates opportunity. More stuff that I can keep track of. Hero stuff. And if Obama were to lose in November - which I don't think he will - I don't think anyone believes he'll disappear; he will be out there, knee deep in the mud, fighting the good fight from a thousand places at once.

In contrast, the Bushes aren't doing squat. (Clinton roped Bush Jr. into helping with Haiti briefly, but he faded into the woodwork again.) I don't remember ex-Pres Reagan doing much, or Ford. Democratic presidents, it seems, remain engaged in public life when they retire. Republican presidents retire.

It puts the lie to the idea that Republicans are compassionate people who believe in charity, but think it needs to come from private citizens instead of the government. The most prominent Republicans, once they're out of government, with wealth and time and influence, do not help. The Democrats do.

I think it's not about where help comes from. I think the Democrats believe it is possible to help people, and the Republicans do not. The Republicans are fatalists. It might even be accurate to say the Republicans believe you should not help people, because helping fucks with God's plan.

American Christianity was perhaps irredeemably perverted by the Cold War, which set up a dualism between Christian Democracy and the Godless Communists. By the book, Christianity follows the notion that the strongest are called on to work the hardest, and that we are obligated to look after the poor, weak, or outcast, and indeed liberation theology has taken firm root in South America. In the U.S., since Communists are Godless, it follows that the God-fearing among us must be the opposite of Communist, and must oppose any kind of social program or redistribution of wealth. Tithing should go to the church, not the needy. People are poor because God is punishing or testing them, and if they haven't gotten themselves out, it's because they are sinners.

This line of thinking takes us back to Divine Right of Kings. Government of and for the 1% indeed.

Comments

[valancy_jane]

I can't argue the presidential issue; that does seem remarkably cut and dry. Oddly, this question has been on my mind, though with a few more facets. Of the people I know, those that do the most charity work are my father and his wife. Who, as you know, are frighteningly Republican. It's actually one of the reasons I think we can still talk; I am increasingly upset by his political leanings, which have gone far right since he married, but he's also upped his community involvement hugely, and is the only person I know who puts serious money into his church and his beliefs - not to mention FL's mission trips, which they have both worked extra to help fund. I know some other people who are similar, but I've wondered what it is that makes his (white, Baptist!, narrow-minded) congregation so incredibly good at outreach, and others not, while at the same time they are able to hold these contradictory views about money and power and politics. I've wondered if it's because the congregation is older, but when I've attended his concerts there, there's a good sprinkling of younger people, and from what he says they're involved, too. How is it that he really walks the walk, and the others don't? What made him different? What makes his church different? And why aren't they all like that?

Part 1

[rinue]

As I'm sure you know, the comments I was making were specifically about people who are professionally Republican or Democratic - candidates, not voters. As a candidate, my political leanings and my personal and professional life are inseparable. As a voter, my political affiliation is nowhere near as defining.

As I'm sure you also know, people who attend church more regularly are more likely to volunteer. I could say it more simply, though: whether you volunteer now is a good predictor of whether you will continue to volunteer. It's like exercise. If it's a habit you've incorporated into your life, you keep doing it without even thinking about it, like eating breakfast or not. And if you're surrounded by other people who also volunteer, you'll be talking about it, thinking about it, and invited to take part in specific volunteer opportunities - just like if you have fitness-oriented friends, they invite you to play tennis with them.

Your father has good volunteering habits. He's also affiliated with a group that reinforces volunteering. Which I think is wonderful. There's a lot to indicate that it's a habit you keep doing once you get into it; now that colleges and high schools in many areas have started requiring a certain number of hours of volunteering from their students, many of those students keep doing it once they graduate.

There's a generational component as well; people who've had a strong emotional reason to pull together tend to keep helping. We saw this with WWII and we saw it with 9/11. I'm actually astonishingly hopeful about the next generation because of the college thing and 9/11, and oddly enough the current recession - the group that went through all that is overwhelmingly turning to public service. In one sense, they're a "lost" generation. In another sense, exactly the opposite.

Culture creates culture. The word "meme" exists for reasons that have nothing to do with the internet. That means when things are bad they get worse, but it also means you can have a virtuous circle. Some people - like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, as it happens, as well as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet - are laying the groundwork for extraordinary things.

Part 2

[rinue]

I don't tend to think of mission trips as charity, by and large. I think of them as a particular kind of tourism, with the exception of things like medical missions, where the people going have non-transferable skills that can make a large difference in a short time. Mission trips to go build houses? Vacations analagous to going to a dude ranch or crewing a sailing ship, with the extra bonus that you get to feel like a spiritually good person and get around the guilt of spending that kind of money and time to travel.

That opinion makes people really angry. But I can't get around it. I'm not actually saying that people shouldn't go on mission trips, any more than I'm saying people shouldn't go on wine tours in Napa or travel to visit museums or practice a language. I think going on mission trips is great, actually, and spiritually sustaining, and a way to help reinforce tolerance and tolerance in yourself, to remember your gratitude for what you have.

But I'm not impressed with your charity when you go on a mission trip, because I think it's about you, not the people you're helping. With, for instance, building houses, the best way to help the locals would be to hire them to build the houses; they're not any more untrained at carpentry than you are, and you've put more money into their economy, given them some usable skills, and haven't wasted money on your flight and lodging. Or with a school, wouldn't it be better to help fund a full-time teacher who can stay there all year? It would. You're visiting because you want to visit, and you can feel really good about it, and can make a limited commitment of time, because hey after that you're leaving the country.

There's also, let's be honest, an unsettling amount of imperialism at work, an idea that you're helping innocent animist savages. If there's a language barrier that makes them seem stupider than they are, all the better. Charities capitalize on this stuff. You're not transferring resources to them - oh no, that would be bad. You're training them in your superior culture. It's pretty infantalizing.

(I think culture is important, obviously, as explicated in part 1. But if I have access to clean water and you don't, culture doesn't enter into why or why not. Knowing how to sterilize the water does nothing for me if I don't have the water to sterilize or a way to do it. And, frankly, I have a limited idea of how to sterilize water that is largely hypothetical, because when would I have to do that? Somebody else should be teaching people how to sterilize their water.)

In many respects, I think mission trips go hand in hand with the same problematic assumptions that make conservatives dislike federal aid programs. Once the people you're helping start thinking they're your equals and should get to have a say in how the resources get used - once they are "uppity" and insufficiently grateful for "my" money - I want to take my toys and go home. Because I don't really think they're unlucky and I'm lucky. I really think I'm better than they are.

That's the divide. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Re: Part 1

[valancy_jane]

I probably put it badly, but I guess my confusion is: how is it this group is doing good things, but so many others in this larger group aren't? What do these people have that, for example, those presidents lack? What makes them different? You point out several possibilities, all of which I agree with; I just wish it were more widespread. I wish I could understand why some really do the private action they talk about, and others don't. More, I just wish it wasn't so.

But as you say: good people doing good things. Even if it's not everyone, as I wish it were.

Re: Part 2

[valancy_jane]

The mission trips that impressed me from his church were the dental ones (apparently an ongoing situation where they send the church dentists to in-need areas in South America, funded by church for supplies/travel); I confess I share some of your thoughts over the more...personal missions? I am not perhaps quite as opinionated, but it is more of a "well, isn't that nice(?)." I have no stake in the God aspect of it, certainly. It's the same thing as charity balls, or similar.

Re: Part 2

[rinue]

As I get older, I get even more impressed with doctors and dentists. As a kid, I always knew the cliche that you should revere doctors because they've given their lives to healing people. But the more primary care doctors and dentists I meet, the more true I think that is. Some of the specialists may be in it for the money and security, but GP's certainly aren't. I don't think you can be around that kind of pain and exhaustion for any kind of money unless you really care. (Kind of like how I don't buy it when people say "I'd teach at an inner-city school if they paid me as well as a banker." Probably not. Probably you'd burn out in 2 years.)

And you know, because I've said it frequently, that I think dentists are the under-sung heroes of our age.

I think it's not practical for me to go back and retrain for the amount of time it would take, but I've thought often in the last year of going into family medicine or obstetrics. I pretty much think I shouldn't put Ciro through that, since on top of how generally difficult that would make anyone's life, we're collaborators and I'm still paying down student debt. But in general I feel like if I really wanted to make a difference, that's what I'd be doing. I have the aptitude.

On the other hand (and I have to emphasize this so that I don't feel so bad about not being a doctor), I probably wouldn't feel this way if I was having more success as an artist. Probably. And I'm qualified to teach, but you don't see me rushing into that and romanticizing that, since I'd actually have to act on it.

I want to switch and be a doctor, though.

RE: Charity balls, indeed. And charity runs. I don't believe you're doing that run for charity. I believe you feel like doing a run.

Re: Part 1

[rinue]

And for the record, you know I love your Dad and enjoy spending time with him. (Which I don't say to take you to task - your relationship to him is dramatically different. I sympathize.) Aside from everything else, he's an extremely generous person. And is someone who loves fixing and teaching, with the credentials and intelligence to be able to do it well. Although at the moment we're on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I'd have to be blind to not see that he's compassionate and admirable.

As for the difference between him and the Republican officeholders, I think his disinterest in heading his department says it all. He doesn't want to be the guy who takes credit for fixing things, occupying his time protecting his power. He wants to be the guy on the ground, fixing things.

Probably the difficulties with your dad come from a few things that aren't easy to fix and may just have to be shrugged off.

1. When he grew up, wealth disparities in the US were not as great and there was a higher degree of social mobility. So his experience of how the world works is markedly different than the way the world now works, and he formed his opinions about the basics of life in a system that only superficially resembled ours.

2. And that time had a huge underclass. He went to a segregated high school, for instance. I'm not saying that to call him a racist - he went to Oak Cliff Pres, for goodness sake, a church that was openly in support of integration. But I don't think it's possible to grow up a white guy in that situation and not internalize your privilege.

3. There's a huge emotional difference between being generous and giving away 10% of what you earn and being taxed 10% of what you earn. In a practical sense, it's the same (in that if you're tithing it you are not directly controlling how it's spent any more than when it's given to the government, and aren't thanked directly any more than you are thanked for government services), but from the standpoint of feelings, we're horrified when something that's "ours" is taken from us.

(For example, if you're given 25 cents for bringing in a reusable grocery bag, you feel nice about it, but you'd be bringing in the bag anyway. Whereas if you're charged 5 cents for each plastic bag the store gives you, people freak out and boycott the store and go to town council meetings to complain about it, because "it's the principle," and if the 5 cent charge stands everybody everybody everybody brings a bag to avoid it.)

This is part of why I love auto deposit; all I see is how much money I make. Whereas if I check my paystub I see the taxes withheld, which makes them "my" money being taken - money that I never had in the first place and didn't budget for. There's also a lot of evidence that if your tax form looks like a bill - like a phone bill or something, not even anything that lists your government services - people respond more favorably to it, because we have the sense that we're paying our bills, but that taxes are being taken from us.

Re: Part 1

[(Anonymous)]

I think you hit on something really fundamental when you talked about his experience in high school. He just – his experience is that he had the worst. Amongst the people he knew he really did. He was incredibly poor for a white guy in that time going to that school. My mother still tears up when she talks about how little he and his family had back then. He was the poorest kid she knew. He sees it as he did it, so why can't everyone else? It even bears out in his community activism – who does he help? Kids at my high school who are interested in science. Women in the engineering program. not to belittle what he does, of course. It makes sense he would help people who share the same interests as him – he knows how to help people interested in engineering because he is an engineer. But at the same time, it does show how he was formed and how he applies that to the world. They are people that he can see making the same efforts he did. Whereas he struggles to understand the kinds of things that I think the Democratic Party is rightly focusing on.

I wonder if the fundamental difference between Democratic and Republican really is just a question of broadening one's perspective. maybe that's so obvious. But to me it is kind of a revelation.

Re: Part 1

[valancy_jane]

Doh, that was me. Didn't realize I was not logged in.

Re: Part 2

[valancy_jane]

I had no idea about the doctor thing, although it also makes complete sense. I know what you mean. There are a few ways to make such a difference the world as in the immediate difference that a doctor is capable of making, or a dentist. The ability to really and truly help someone. I just started watching deadwood, and this is silly, but watching it, the need for a doctor, the constant sickness – it makes me wish I could jump on screen and help people. I know it's only fiction. I know it's so much worse in the rest of the world right now as well, but it was still quite a reminder. sometimes I wish i could abandon my own life or split myself in two and go out and do something helpful. More than the little that I do, anyhow. Anyhow, strongly agreed. Especially on the charity runs. Don't get me started.

Re: Part 2

[rinue]

Yeah, I don't bring up the doctor thing because it's fairly clearly just a daydream; it would mess with everyone pretty badly if I went that direction, particularly since I have no idea whether medical licences transfer from country to country. It would be an oddly selfish selfless decision.

Re: Part 1

[rinue]

The way I think of it is all of us are looking to protect our tribe. It's just that some of us define our family as our family and some of us define our family as everyone in the world.

One of the things I've been watching with curiosity is to see how this tea party/ultraconservative shift hard to the right impacts voter identification. There's a thing going on about defining a "true" or "pure" Republican, and those who don't toe the Norquist line are out. Dems will show up in greater numbers for a more liberal candidate, but we don't throw anybody out of the party. (Sort of Joe Lieberman. But only sort of.) I don't know whether that will make the Republicans more graspable by giving them a defined brand ("I know what they stand for") or whether they're going to go down in flames because they only want the "right" people to vote for them, which takes you a limited distance in an elected government.

Re: Part 1

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know whether that will make the Republicans more graspable by giving them a defined brand ("I know what they stand for") or whether they're going to go down in flames because they only want the "right" people to vote for them, which takes you a limited distance in an elected government

It seems to me that they accomplished the former in the 1980s but they are likely to accomplish the latter in this current era. Or maybe I just am hoping that people have grown a little.