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Some of the lessons I learned during the wild days at Lille Skole were simple. At one point, the students and I got involved in fixing their bicycles. We had resurrected a bike from underwater in Buffalo Bayou. We named it “Lazarus” and, eventually, got it working. We started switching parts from broken bikes to create working models. Getting wilier at publicity by then, I managed to get 20-30 dysfunctional bicycles donated to our project. Then I invited the Fourth Ward neighborhood children in and let them participate in our ongoing “bicycle clinic.” Putting parts together, we created useful bicycles and gave them to whoever was handy. In my fertile imagination, our happy children were learning mechanics while contributing to the general happiness in the slums nearby.
I call this lesson the “liberal’s lament.” One evening when the bicycle project was at its peak, when I was attending the university, our kind neighbors swept in and took every usable bicycle at the school, including those that had originally belonged to the Lille Skole students. They took the spare parts. For good measure they also took all my tools and the outdoor music system we used while working on the bikes. It wasn’t just a burglary, it was a mass action. People just traipsed in and took what they wanted. Some of them were still walking off with the school property when I came home late that evening!
The lesson of the liberal’s lament is that one can’t just open their hearts to people. If you want to do some good, you have to think it through. Acts of simple, unthinking, kindness are apt to backfire something awful. Liberal’s lament!
I had to amend my original theory about the cows. We may have a herd instinct and want to help one another, but, unlike cattle, we have to use our entire intellect if we hope to make any difference.
This was a very important lesson to me. Up to then, I practiced the general confusion between good feelings and intentions versus having a thoughtful, designed, plan to improve society. The difference between charity and pragmatic helpfulness wasn’t clear.
Hardly conscious person can look around his/her own world and claim that things are going well for everyone. As I write this, for example, I live in the city with the highest rate of child poverty in the nation. Dallas is a very rich city with outlandish expenditures on architecture and foreign sports cars at one end of the scale, and daily ongoing abuse for the children at the other end.
I’ve always admired Eugene Victor Debs, America’s preeminent trade unionist, socialist, and anti-war leader. His accomplishments are many: pioneering industrial unionism, popularizing socialism, and garnering a million votes for President while languishing in federal prison for publicly opposing World War I.
At the personal level, Debs was a sharing man. His wife would complain that he would go for walks and return without his coat, because he gave it to whoever he saw that needed one. In other words, Eugene Victor Debs apparently didn’t distinguish between his everyday charity and his dedication to real change.
It’s my opinion that Debs might have been more effective if he had paid more attention to organizing for social improvement and less to his application for personal sainthood. In his day, there were only two socialist parties in the industrialized world that did not support the carnage of World War I. The other one, Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, rose in victory while ours reached its clear peak and started its long downhill slide during the war. I am not at all sure that Debs’ role could have made a difference, but it might have. Just speculating.
Charity makes no real difference in society. In fact, it could be argued that it provides the lubrication for the giant exploitative machine. In other words, some of the worst built-in features of modern American society don’t even make a squeak as the machine hums along, simply because of the lubrication of charity.
I can’t be against charity, and no caring person can. Doing charitable acts is miles-away better than doing nothing about people’s constant suffering. But charity isn’t a way to make improvements. How does it go? Give a family a fish and they will eat for a day, but teach them to fish and they will eat better for a longer period of time -- or something to that effect. A better old adage is probably, “When I fed people they called me a saint, but when I organized them to get their own food they called me a communist,” or words to that effect.
Many of the parents of the school and, especially, one-day visitors, saw me as a patient, giving, caring man, even when I knew better. People liked to take pictures of me doing a reading lesson or just holding a small child in my lap. I gave talks far and wide about how to respect children and stop beating them.
My changing attitude toward charity and helpfulness was not an easy change for me. I really liked the instant gratification I got from giving away bicycles, for example, and my ego soared as I polished my halo. But there was no denying the reality: charity doesn’t change things and can even be accused of helping keep things the way they are!
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