The limits of charity...

Those who think voluntarism and charity will reduce the growing gap between rich and poor should think again

Commentary from Larry Solway

  Yes Ontario - there really IS a Santa Claus.
  I'm three weeks out of date on the Mike Harris promise that no child will go without a Christmas present, but better late... The Premier is dazed and incoherent about Christmas for kids. Of course he is also magnificent in his utter denial of reality.
  Yes Virginia, and everyone else, there is no Santa living at or near Queen's Park - in spite of what our noble leader has proclaimed. He really meant to say that there were always those doers of good deeds. There are still all those once-a-year concern, the free turkeys, and the Sally Ann approach which is minimalist, not because the Salvation Army doesn't care, but because the problems are oceans and space-treks beyond their capacity to solve. Trying is not good enough, Saying you care is not good enough. Being Santa Mike certainly is not good enough.
 

We have to stop deluding ourselves that the problems go away if we have well-meaning volunteers

  It's no longer news but the larger issue is that the Premier, along with his Alliance buddies who think The Churches should handle social needs, has this abiding belief that somehow volunteers and well meaning charities can make up for government and societal neglect. These are the same people who deplore the "nanny state" were money from hard-working taxpayers gushes out goodies for the unworthy and does nothing except make people even more dependant. You can hear: "We've been throwing money at social problems for years and nothing has changed."
  First of all - a lot has changed. The hopeless have hope. The illiterate get educated, the unemployed work at new careers and skills, and believe it or not, there are some little children who get the benefit of professional day care and all the educational boost it implies. The disadvantaged get advantages. The forgotten get remembered.
  To hear the Nanny State critics say it, nothing has changed since we did away with debtors prison.
  But I guess Mike Harris believes that The Star Santa Claus fund and all the clones of that good- hearted giving at newspapers and radio stations, will shore up the shortfall. Just like Food Banks feed people. Strange, they feed more and more people at the same time that more and more "other" people are getting richer.
  In July a former school teacher and New York Times editor named Sara Mosle wrote: Why Volunteerism Doesn't work. She is not sitting on the sidelines throwing stones. She is a volunteer who sweated through several years of mentoring inner city New York kids. Not only were volunteers not able to scratch the surface, but the meager supply of them was dropping because of busier business workplace demands.
  She sounded heart-stricken writing of the failure of government to pick up the slack. She said that the problems are far too great to b e dealt with piecemeal by well-meaning volunteers. She is especially scathing about George Bush I's famous thousand points of light, about the "compassionate conservatives", and about Colin Powell calling for thousands to help.
  Mosle writes that mentoring, as with any other volunteer work, demands full time attention. You can't get full-time from a part-time volunteer.
  But just as many of our education problems would be lessened by having more teachers and fewer students per teacher, our social systems would work better if there were more full time people in place. Even our prison system would work better if we had more probation officers keeping track of ex-cons. (Many who say New York's mayor Rudy Giuliani made New York safer forget, or never knew to begin with, that one of Giuliani's moves was to quadruple the number of probation officers to mentor ex-cons and juvenile offenders.)
  Charity is good. Volunteerism is great. But we have to stop deluding ourselves that the problems go away if we have well-meaning volunteers. Many of those well-meaning folks also believe in less government, which also means fewer paid people working in socially needy settings. They contradict themselves.
  I know there are many like me who get cynical at this time of year, when so many of us fairly ooze compassion and concern, which tends to evaporate under the hard press of reality after the Christmas decorations come down and the last of the turkey leftovers is groaningly devoured.
  Charitable giving and volunteerism are important because they give us the sense of being part of a caring society. They give dignity to caring. But that still is not enough. Well-meaning socialites throw those grand charity balls for their favourite causes and spend a fortune on designer dresses to be photographed by Toronto Life. Cynics suggest the money spent on the designer gowns would exceed the amount raised by the charity, not to mention the limos and flowers and fine food. But still, I suppose it's better than nothing.
  And it is better than nothing when NGOs (Non-government organizations) play an important role in the Third World. Heaven knows, governments in those countries are spending their money on arms, and what doesn't go for machine guns and land mines gets spirited off to Swiss banks. Does anyone but me sigh a little every time we see a TV public service announcement showing some poor little Third World waif who only we can save with our money to Foster Parents, or to Christian Children's Fund or whatever? Oxfam feeds people where the countries can't or won't do the feeding, or where the less than 1% of the population that is scandalously wealthy sit in their estates behind barbed wire and avoid the sight or smell of the disadvantaged in their shanty towns.
  I agree that you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it. But it is also true that you can't solve the problem by starving it to death.

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