People who work with "the urban poor" often face confusing choices.
What I have in mind here are not so much the tactical options that arise as a problem or situation is confronted. However, the higher level choices I want to consider here do affect tactical decisions dramatically.
Stated simply, what do low-income persons and neighborhoods need most? Charity or justice?
Most of the inner city enterprises I know best usually drop down on the side of charity, compassion and a smattering of education as empowerment.
I know we administer quite a lot of charity here at Central Dallas Ministries.
We distribute hundreds of thousands of pounds of food stuff annually.
We offer free and extremely reduced cost medical, dental and pharmacy care to thousands of patients.
We provide free or extremely reduced cost legal representation.
We have increasingly sophisticated approaches to employment training, technology education and job placement.
We offer after-school programming and summer day camping for children.
We are building affordable housing units and have plans for many more in the future.
We have homelessness on our radar screen thanks to recent developments in Dallas.
The list could go on and on.
When I look at our work, I feel two emotions.
First, a warmth of gratitude at the good that is being done by some of the best people I have ever known.
Second, a persistent fear that we are in danger of missing an even higher calling.
Don't misunderstand. Compassion is important. At times, charity is the best and only remedy to apply.
Jesus' story of the "good Samaritan" comes to mind.
The man left for dead on the side of the road didn't need a meeting of the city council! He needed medical attention, a ride to town and someone to stop and simply care about him in his dire situation of distress.
Compassion usually works best after the facts of life have played themselves out in someone's experience. Charity feels right when offered and when received in a pinch!
But, compassion is seldom enough, at least not for the long haul.
The city has taught me to read Jesus' story of the Samaritan differently. My new reading wouldn't change the facts of the story.
However, I might add a follow up commentary.
The story makes me wonder how many other people routinely experienced the same kind of mistreatment on that road? How much more charity work did that road create for passersby? Who was responsible for safety on that stretch of highway? What could have been done to make it safer?
In other words, how could the system have made that road better for everyone?
I know that was not the point Jesus was trying to make. He was trying to teach a lesson about what it means to be a neighbor.
I guess I am asking what does it mean to be a real community that sets things up for the benefit and good of as many people as possible?
We seem to have countless outposts of charity. While I am glad about this in one way, in another I wonder what this really says about our society?
In addition to charity and compassion, we need, we must work for justice.
Is the best approach for the long haul to continue to provide tons of supplemental food for hard working families who do not earn enough to support themselves? Or, would it be better to ask why there is such a shortfall, especially in a nation of wealth like ours?
Should we continue to develop community-based medical outposts, complete with pharmacies for the hard working families we serve who do not receive the benefit of health insurance coverage from their employers? Or, would it be better to organize around this disparity in order to seek change?
Is it really a good thing to work with community groups in the inner city to organize neighborhood cleanups and patrols? Or, do we need to organize to compel city government to apply code enforcement in our neighborhoods like it is expected in more affluent parts of town?
Should we continue to visit people who end up in prison because of the very addictions we seek to address on a daily basis? Or, would it be better for us to ask why so many, mainly low-income men and women who need treatment, get prison instead?
At the end of this day the answer likely needs to include both compassion and justice. There is and will always be a place for charity and compassion. We won't get it right, so we will need to compensate.
Having said that, I feel the need to press hard against our prevailing tendency to do only acts of charity while never thinking of ways to embed justice, fairness and equality in the systems that guide our communities.
[More to come on this.]
8 comments:
Larry,
Great thoughts. It seems to me that justice is often uncomfortable.
I wonder if the robbers in the parable were first-time offenders or if someone had mistakenly shown too much "compassion" instead of giving them the just rewards for their previous acts?
In recent service on a jury we struggled with this exact issue. Is it compassion to give a young man who made a series of very bad choices a break? Or, is compassion more appropriately applied to the victim and possible future victims?
Kent,
I don't know if it worked this way for everyone, but I learned to give by receiving. I learned to care about others by being cared for. And I learned compassion by receiving it. I don't think most criminals are "victims" in terms of someone else being responsible for their crimes, but if they have enough fear/hate/greed/violence to commit a crime, they do have a problem - they don't understand how God created us, and thus who we are and can be.
If the legal system actually did something to help criminals reform, I couldn't agree more to get someone off the streets for his well-being as well as everyone else's. And I'm not sure turning him back out on the streets with no penalty for his actions is actually compassion, given the behavior it reinforces.
But I don't think we can ever suffer from too much compassion, from trying too hard to help people fix/improve their lives regardless of what they've done.
I don't mean to offend, as your comment indicates you wrestled with this in your decision. And I don't think the system gave any options that were really helpful (i.e., the systemic injustices I think Larry's describing). But love is never an either/or game - if loving God and sinners can stand together as the highest commandment, loving criminals and victims isn't such a paradox.
John, I suppose that my idealism, my understanding of what has actually happened in the past coupled with my hard headed resolve won't let me settle where you suggest. The points you make are all valid and undeniable, unless you are a stubborn sort like me! Put simply: I refuse to give up and in.
I realize that to change the system even a little will take enormous patience and dogged determination. It will involve community organizing like none of us are currently up to. I realize the current political system is built upon money and who has it. To some extent this has always been the case.
I also agree that modifying or softening unchecked capitalism is a worthy goal. It is also a wonderful thing to "educate" the wealthy about their responsbilities, etc. I also know that Bill Gates will certainly do more than either of us. This is not to admit though that the replication of more Gates types is the solution.
What is called for is enlightened capitalism that does give much. But beyond that to solve the educational challenges of the U. S. or the AIDS crisis in Africa there must be political movement and change--systemic alterations.
In line with your ideas, I agree that we need to learn how to harness capitalism and capital to accomplish our own goals of equity and full inclusion in the society. We do need to master the ways of our system and use it to our advantage. I am not suggesting some sort of "over throw" at all, but a powerful effort to assure that the system works better and more fairly for all.
I really believe that the tide will turn back due to the sheer weight of some of the issues.
While it is true that the poor and those of us who are devoted to these matters have little economic power, we do have resting political capacity, albeit compromised by our own addiction to the allure and promise of capitalism that we all can be a Gates!
In short, John, your realism is challenging. But, I refuse to accept all of your conclusions about what is possible. More on this to come.
This excerpt from today's NYTimes op-ed by Thomas Friedman is an interesting point on what capitalism can deliver if society wants it to:
"Even more interesting is how Indian firms are taking the skills they learned from outsourcing and using them to develop low-cost products for the low-wage Indian market: a medical insurance plan for the poor for as little as $10 a year, a $2,000 car, a $200 laptop, supercheap cellphones, a low-fare airline ($75 one-way for the three-hour Bangalore-Delhi flight) that sells tickets from Internet kiosks in gas stations. Indian companies know that if they can make money producing low-cost technology for poor Indians, it gives them an incredible platform to then take these products global. (Imagine the profit potential if they work in the West?) China is doing the exact same thing."
I'm sure these items are probably subpar in various ways, but wouldn't it be great if they were available to people who can't afford the lowest-end models now?
Charles and John, this is fascinating. It has the sound of a new sort of "profit center" built on scale and volume. How do we do this? Is it appropriate for an organization like ours to venture out here? In essence we are to Dallas what India is to the world, except we major in providing the bulging markets for these new product approaches, right?
Many funders are placing an increasing emphasis on the sustainability of organizations, and are looking at program-related income (PRI) and earned income as a key determiner of that.
Beyond funding, though, this makes some sense from a progammatic standpoint. We all tend to devalue that which is free, and to overly value that in which we have a financial stake. I wonder if any studies have been done on the impact of a fee-based program compared to a comparable program offered at no cost to clients?
Jeremy, I don't know of any formal studies, but I know I could tell whose parents were paying for college, and who was working their own way through, because the latter spent all of their fewer free hours studying.
Larry, I think this would be an ideal way to give real support to the poor. Would you like me to try to contact the writer for more information, or otherwise investigate this?
Charles, yes, by all means. Anything you could discover like this would be of great interest to me. Thanks for taking the lead on this!
Post a Comment