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. 

Avoid the United Way, if You Can

It has been many years since I donated to the United Way. I have not done so since the last time an employer pressured me into it.  I think other people should avoid it as well.

In the first place a person’s contribution goes into a big pot from which other people who have earlier selected a set of beneficiaries will then select what fraction of the total each beneficiary gets. Most people who donate to charities have some groups or causes  they prefer over others (and perhaps some they actively dislike and would never choose to support).  When they give money to the United Way, they lose the opportunity to act on those preferences with their donation.  

Then there is the structure of the United Way’s campaigns and the behavior of its campaigners. By focusing on and working through employers,  the United Way makes improper pressuring  of employees likely and probably inevitable, and as the saying goes, this is a feature, not a bug.  Long ago when I worked as a programmer at a local bank,  employees dreaded the beginning of United Way season and its attendant shakedowns.  The bank’s president saw one hundred percent participation by its employees in the United Way as a matter of prestige in the local ruling circles and pretty much demanded it. He also wanted to see a certain amount of total donations and gave each department quotas.  I generally gave the least I could get away with until I became lead on a programming team after which I might donate enough to get my boss  to leave the people reporting to me alone. In those days (and perhaps still) there was a big deal made of giving one’s “fair share” as defined as one percent of one’s annual income. Since the quotas were less than that, most people did not do it. As well as I can remember from what others told me, some of  the main exceptions were up and coming brownnosers  among the  would be executives and some low paid  keypunch operators, maintenance people, clerks and so on (many of whose incomes would have qualified them as recipients of help from some of the agencies on the United Way’s list) who were afraid for their jobs.

A few years later my brother had the bad luck to be lent by his employer to the United Way.  In one of the meetings he attended,  it came up that a local business was refusing to solicit its employees for the United Way. The response from  one of the United Way’s executives was to announce that he would find out which local bank had that businessman’s loans and arrange for it to help him change his mind. I don’t know if this sort of thing still goes on in my town or other places, but given the structure of the thing, I would think that is the way to bet.

There are far better ways to generous than donating to the United Way.  I hope those who have a free choice use  them and those being pressured fork over as little as they can get away with.

Hurricane Harvey Notes

We made a donation today to relief for victims of Hurricane Harvey. We picked the Samaritan’s Purse organization, but there are various good choices out there such as the Red Cross. I hope many people will make donations.   I would suggest avoiding any organization controlled by Sylvester Turner or any other politicians or officials in Houston’s city government for the obvious reasons that hack  politicians usually cannot be trusted with money in amounts larger than thirty cents.

As was predictable some have tried to find political advantage in the disaster.  Devotees of the green religion in the media and politics have painted the hurricane as a dire result of global warming, ignoring the both the fact that hurricanes have occurred  in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico as long has people have kept records and the fact that there has been recent lull in hurricanes hitting the US.  One leftist cartoonist managed to ridicule Christians, Texans, libertarians, and conservatives all at once with a vulgar cartoon of a buffoonish Texan with a “secede” placard  being rescued from a flood and attributing his good fortune to divine providence when it is actually due to his omni-benevolent (except for Trump) federal government.  After being criticized the cartoonist waffled and claimed he was really only wanting to insult secessionists and not Texans in general. Well, one can wait and see if he produces something similar featuring a Calexit favoring leftist the next time that state has a natural disaster. That’s probably not the way to bet.

Of course conservatives made their political points as well. One on the radio, noting the large number of black people getting rescued, wondered why the Black Lives Matter crowd was nowhere to be seen in a situation where others of all races were pitching in to help their fellow Americans and suggested that actual black lives in themselves may not matter too much to BLM. It was a rude observation but not an unreasonable one.  

The dumbest comments came from some in the traditional media who, while not disputing  the substantive  things the administration is doing, fretted that Trump was not emotional and schmaltzy enough and did not deliver a sufficient amount of made-for-TV  “empathy”.  I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that most victims would prefer ten cents of actual assistance to fifty bucks worth of a politician's empathy any day. In their position, I certainly would. 

Giving Back 2

Various writers have  emphasized the indifference or even hostility of many conservatives and business people to intellectual, linguistic,  and ideological notions and nuances as one reason for their frequent inability  to cope with attacks from the left. In recent times it has become common to hear the maladroit Republicans labeled the stupid party (often versus the Democrats as the evil party) partially for similar reasons by people who generally wish them  well.

A minor, though not trivial, example comes from the widespread use and acceptance of the loaded  term “giving back” which I have griped about before. TV is full of commercials bragging piously  about how some business or another and its employees give back to somebody. Local news programs regularly serve up fulsome features about someone giving back to one community or another.  Philanthropists often refer to their generosity in the same way.

Yet the notion of giving something back has the connotation of returning something to its rightful owners, and in this context implies that whatever is being given  is owed in some sense to the people  it is being given to and perhaps was acquired at their expense or even taken from them unfairly.  This has fairly obvious political implications, but as far as I can tell conservatives, business people, and Republicans who blather along with the rest about giving back haven’t noticed. They should know better.

The right way to respond to a solicitation or demand for giving back  is to reply that you never took anything that did not belong to you and so feel no need to give it  back to anyone. Giving out of generosity is a fine  thing.  “Giving back” concedes things which should not be conceded.

We’ll be doing some charitable giving  this Christmas season, but we dang sure won’t be doing any giving back.  Others should follow suit.

Giving Back

Every so often people write articles about  trite, over used, syrupy, or simply annoying words or phrases they would like to see fall into disuse. I would like to nominate “giving back” as in “giving back to the community” or “giving back to his fans” or “giving back to the people of _________”   for dishonorable retirement, not only because it has become such a hackneyed phase and one so often uttered with such mush mouthed piety,  but also because of the assumptions behind its use.  

When one hears talk about giving back or the need to give back to the community, there is usually an at least implied sense of some sort of obligation or even of some level of guilt to be assuaged. Yet a person who came by his success honestly and fairly  has no such obligation and should feel no such guilt. He  would be quite right to reply to a claim that he is obligated to give something back by simply stating that no he isn’t, because he never took anything  that did not belong to him. In fact a person who acquires wealth honestly by selling his goods and/or services has already given back every time he did so by giving the people he sold to something they valued enough to pay him for it. There is no obligation beyond that. Giving charitably to people or organizations that he wants to help or support is a fine thing for a successful person to do - “giving”,  without the “back” and its implications of guilt and obligation. That is the clean way to do it.

Of course there are people who are obligated to give something back. They are the  thieves and con artists of the world, and their form of giving back has a precise name. It is called restitution. The rest of us should do our giving freely, because we want to, not because of any obligation or a need to appease someone.  

A Word Against the United Way

I would like to offer a minority opinion and say a word against the United Way, at least as it has operated in my city. The fundamental problem with the United Way is that too often it operates in the workplace as a shakedown. In less desirable working environments this is often done explicitly and directly. Even in better companies where employees are not coerced, there can be a strong implicit pressure when the boss is the one passing the hat.

  I once worked in a place where employees were heavily pressured by their bosses to donate to the United Way. Each year among the most reliable givers of their “fair share” were the least educated, lowest income employees - some of whom probably could have qualified for benefits from some of the agencies - who, fearful for their jobs, dutifully ponied up. The whole thing was disgusting. It was not only a shakedown of those of us who might resent it but at least could afford it. It was also a disgraceful shakedown of the most vulnerable, and it was done blatantly and with no purpose other than to allow our repulsive little CEO to appear among the other civic leaders and announce that our goal had been met. (The very most reliable fair share givers in that dysfunctional outfit were the up and coming careerist brown nosers who tended to see the whole thing less as charity than as just one more item of cost on the road to ingratiate themselves with the bosses.)

The pressure is not restricted to employees within companies. United Way fund raisers pressure companies and business owners to have their employees participate as well. I know of at least one case of United Way teams deciding to threaten a business that did not want to participate with retaliation from the bank that held its business loans. The whole thing just smells bad. It is questionable in concept and callous and sleazy in practice. It often has less to do with charity than with the desire of a bunch of preening suits to show off, network, and congratulate each other on how “civic minded” they are.

  So I urge people to avoid it of they can. If they have the choice, they should select some of the United Way charities they find worthy and donate to them directly. It’s cleaner, and it has the additional advantage that each person can choose to give to things that most interest him.

Food Bank

Our city has a large local food bank that includes a large plant for drying and packaging food for shipment. The food bank has done some useful work particularly in sending dehydrated food to poor areas overseas and to locations hit by natural disasters. However its main public focus is on ameliorating a supposed problem with hunger in our own country and in particular in our own region. Its influence is pervasive. We are faced at every turn with canned food drives for the food bank sponsored by this or that organization, often offering free or reduced admission to some event to those who bring a donation. The public schools push their students to participate. Clubs and groups of all sorts join in. One grocery store sells preselected, pre-wrapped donation bags that customers can purchase and drop off. A local TV station devotes the weeks before Thanksgiving to hectoring the citizenry to bring food to the food bank.

This is all interesting and seems to make a lot of people feel virtuous. It provides a diversion to a number of people and allows a lot of folks to get their picture on TV or their name in the papers. However one has to wonder if we are being given a little slice of the big lie with all this.

In the first place, to the extent malnutrition exists in this country it seems almost always connected with things such as dementia or other debilitating health problems of the elderly, willful neglect or abuse of children by a parent or custodian, drug abuse, alcoholism, mental problems, or simply bad choices that have nothing to do with the actual availability of food. The main nutritionally related health problem of poor people in this country is obesity, not anything related to deficiency. The country spends billions of dollars each year on the food stamp program - now called Supplemental Nutritional Access Program or SNAP - to make food available to those who need it. Of course the food stamp program has its problems with  overpayment, fraud everywhere, and the opportunity for recipients to use the benefits to trade at a discount for money to buy non-food items instead of purchasing food, but these again are not problems of availability of resources to obtain food. (It is interesting as an aside that those beating the drums for the food bank seem not to realize that their claims of hunger in the community are a tacit admission that the food stamp program could use a strong dose of reform and loophole closing.)

Still the drumbeat goes on, and there is usually an undertone, attempting to induce guilt and suggesting that those sitting at home with plenty to eat are somehow to blame. Well they aren’t, and they should reject any suggestion that they are. They should enjoy their Thanksgiving turkey with a sense of pride and gratitude that they live in the freest, most productive country the world has ever seen (with perhaps a kind thought for the farmer). They might also consider finding other charities besides the food bank or its national affiliates.