September 12, 2013
There is No Free Lunch
There are two well established meal sites in my community
who are purported to be in great need of volunteers, food staples and fresh
produce. I find the number of free breakfast and lunch meals served to be
astounding for our mid-size community. Both organizations boast of being
respectful of their clientele’s situation in life, “We’ll feed anyone who comes in for a meal; we never ask any questions
[about their financial need].” The Prodigal son who squandered his wealth in
wild living comes to mind. I have to wonder if he ever would have come to his
senses and returned to his Father had his employer served him a daily
complimentary breakfast and lunch. This lost son, “…longed to fill his stomach with the pods
that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.”
(Lk 15:16 NIV)
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Gail;
-----It sounds like you and my wife have been chatting. Some people are terrified of enabling another’s bad situation. I am the common air-head who will reach into his pocket at the sight of anyone’s first tear. But life doesn’t fit one box. Every one of us is a giant shake-bag of individuation. Some tears need fed. Others need starved.
-----That realization should lead us into the very beneficial process of intimate conversation. There is nothing wrong with getting acquainted with other people and their viewpoints which are bringing them into contact with you. The problem about it is deceit, especially when incentive to gain or aversion to loss is involved. And of course, that’s what we’re talking about.
-----But that none of our two meal lines or the local food bank are willing to ask questions and take notes I believe to be a great problem. I am on the food bank’s advisory board. They do not want to do anything which might dissuade a popper from dropping by for a handout. And they say that those whose need for the help is most real are those whose shame about their circumstances is most sensitive. If asked about their need they will stay away, goes the reasoning.
-----Josephus’ story of the woman caught in the siege of Jerusalem who cooked her child and hid it from others to enjoy for herself convinces me otherwise. Psychology studies and the neurological working of the brain, too, indicate that a sufficient level of hunger passes the decision making processes to factors other than, “Oh I might get embarrassed.” Let them hunger till they open up to the hand from which they want fed, is the way I now see it. I have lived with Chari for a blissfully long time, and she’s effecting me. Nobody likes paperwork, but everybody dislikes starvation worse. Give ‘em the paper. Give ‘em the pen, the chair, and a table.
-----And wonder how many will lie. When we have to divert to soup lines and freebie mess halls, then our society is broken to the point of imploding anyway. This mentality that generosity must come from collective action is the mentality of collectivists, of course. We remember who collectivists were, don’t we? The 20th century gave us a good look at many of them and their horrors. Those horrors all precipitate from the fact that an individual’s generosity can be neither directed nor maintained by central control.
-----Soup lines, food banks, and government welfare wreak social destruction. They eliminate the personal contact between the giver and the receiver. Facts hide poorly amongst intimacy. When giving is face to face, critical discretion may better determine whether a handout is necessary, or a bit of a hunger lessen. This is why God’s welfare system prescribed through Moses was that of gleaning. The poor had to labor in gathering it themselves in front of the field owner. If he liked the gleaner, he’d leave a few more choice kernels for her. If not, he might harvest a bit more thoroughly. The gleaners were known to the community (except for the sojourner.) What we’ve gotten by burying intimacy is a population’s higher propensity to seek gain through deceit, a public in complicit support of that deceit, and many more deceitfully happy hammock-dwellers. Yummy.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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