Giving Back?

Some bad linguistic creations are innocent and fairly accidental  – the work of poor folks whose  language is not English but some dialect of Bureaucratese or Educanto, and who cannot translate well.  Others, such as the substitution of “Native American” for “Indian”, are neither but rather were made and promoted to serve a political purpose.  (Throughout the world, a native of a country is any person who was born there, as distinguished from an immigrant.  The implication of making only Indians natives of America is that everyone else is a guilty interloper, and that Indians deserve privileges as victims.)  “Giving back” is one of those.

The notion of giving back implies an obligation to return something one has taken and a need to make amends or even atonement.  It implies that  a person’s success is somehow a gift from or a loss to society requiring repayment.  An honest person’s  reaction to a plea to give back should be  that he doesn’t  need to give anything back because he never took anything that did not belong to him, and that the money he made from working was earned in by offering  people goods and services they wanted and were willing to pay for.

There are people who do need to give back. They are called thieves and con artists, and it is quite appropriate to make them  perform restitution.   The rest of us do not and should not let anyone convince us we do. People should give when and to whom they like, freely and because they want to, not because of guilt or some nonexistent responsibility. And they should never accept anyone calling their generosity giving back.