Yesterday here we got into a sort of discussion about what is owed children – specifically, what is owed the children of people who have them solely to extort a living from the well meaning and caring in society (or those who wish to be thought so.)
One of the first forms of assistance any human society gave or tried to give was for “widows and orphans.” As far back as it’s mentioned (in the Bible as a form of charity, for instance) there really wasn’t anything widows could do to support themselves and children. (Sometimes they could support themselves, barely. But throw in children and they were up a creek.) The differential of manual/brute force work that males and females in our species are capable of – and the fact that most of the work at the time was physically demanded left the woman with children with a lot of unpalatable options, the most palatable of which might have been “find a protector.”
So charity to widows and orphans was exhorted and, as soon as it could be done, something was done by “widows and orphans” – even by kings and queens and feudal lords, at least ones that tried to appear benevolent.
I’m not disputing – no one is – that looking after helpless children is a function society should fulfill. I am disputing how we do it, but that’s a topic for another day. It seems to me that was with a lot of otherwise useful institutions, writers and filmmakers concentrating on the worst examples of the kind (and not always with the aim to bring about social reform. Sometimes simply with the aim to build on those who critiqued these institutions and found fame through it) orphanages and madhouses have been willfully destroyed without anything better replacing them. (And before you say that orphanages were uniformly bad – I’m sure a lot of them WERE. BUT all of them? I don’t know anyone raised in an orphanage, but my mom did. Yes, he had some issues, including a feeling of belonging to no one. More than children raised in a merry go round of foster homes, though? Do tell.)
Part of the problem with where we are is that we have to trust adults who MANIFESTLY aren’t able to look after themselves or be responsible about their own lives, to be responsible with the money we give for assistance to the children in their care.
The flaws of this are illustrated every time those who are receiving assistance for their children show us pitiful pictures of ill-dressed, ill-fed children. I know that there is a faction that denies that parents receiving assistance for their children blow the food money on non-nutritious and often non-edible things, or things that in no way benefit the children. I know the same faction is fond of saying every time we see a case of a kid raised on assistance, that what we need is to give them more money. I remember a lively discussion in a forum, where someone said they watched a mother pay with an assistance card for an order consisting of a massive cake, balloons and soda. The tenor of the answers was “well, poor children need birthday parties too. Why shouldn’t they have nice things.”
Of course no one is saying they shouldn’t have nice things, but I sometimes wonder if the “more assistance needed” flavor of do gooders who tend to be comfortable upper middle class have ANY idea how those of us just a little below them fare and how we look after our kids through the tight times.
All of us have known tight times, in my generation. ALL OF US. Particularly those of us who are middle class by dint of a technical job. We came of age in the eighties when temporary jobs were all most of us could get, and we’ve navigated through jobs that very often unexpectedly disappear and – 2001-03 – sometimes stay disappeared for months or forever in some regions. I have friends who haven’t worked for more than six months at a time since the tech bust. We’ve learned to cope. Most of us continue to live middle class lives, in the sort of houses you’d expect, but… but we cope.
What I mean is that whether our children got to “have nice things or not” in the abstract, in the practical, we made compromises. A “birthday party” around here is often a trip to the zoo. (Yes, still. We like animals.) If we’re doing well financially, it might be an overnight trip to Denver and include museums, but that’s because the kids are older. If we’re not doing well, there might not even be a trip to the zoo. As with many other things, it becomes “mom cooks a nice meal and we have some friends over.”
My kids have had a bakery made cake, I think, four times in their entire life. (And only because there was this mom and pop bakery which was good and quite reasonable. Gone now.) The rest of the time they made do with my baking skills. (Those actually aren’t bad. My cake decorating skills however needed work, and I had to learn.) This is how I ended up making the multi-tier robot-cake for Marshall’s robotics group at their graduation.
And now you’re going to say that if the mothers of most kids on assistance were the kind who could/would put themselves out to make a cake/learn to bake/decorate they probably would have escaped assistance quickly, even if they’d fallen into it by sheer bad luck.
That is not necessarily true. As we’ve talked about before, the entire welfare bureaucracy seems to keep people there, once they fall in. This also I suspect leads even competent parents to the sort of state of despondent despair where they can’t make rational decisions.
But that is precisely the point. To render assistance to the children, we got through the parents. And if the parents weren’t broken to begin with, the system breaks them.
Part of the problem is that none of us on the – ah – side of liberty is particularly sanguine about terminating parents’ rights. Given how, say, the IRS is used we can easily see kids being taken from parents for having the wrong opinions/teaching children to pray in a way that’s considered bad/someone else wants the kids.
Mind you, the state already capriciously removes children from homes because they think the parent looked at them crosseyed while at the same time ignoring life-threatening abuses from much worse people. Sometimes it seems to be designed solely to make it as bad as possible.
No, I don’t have a solution. As with mental health and involuntary commitment, the closest I can come to a solution is “make these things happen on as micro a scale as you can; make the decisions in the smallest community possible.” Will there still be injustices? Well, of course there will. There have been for centuries. Besides, any human institution malfunctions and has injustices and horrors, even the best ones. BUT we might avoid the sort of “error by default” that we see in children services these days.
Take mental health, because I have an example. When I was little, the village decided to commit a young man, a local farm hand for hire. He was built on a massive scale, and a nice, quiet man. He did the work of ten men and lived with his widowed mother.
Then one day something happened. He would yell and moan at night. And during the day, he would run through the village street, stark naked, claiming that “This isn’t ours.” I.e. he was absolutely convinced that his body, from the neck down, wasn’t his.
The village elders (well, informal, you know. The grocer, two of the largest farmers, the pharmacist, that kind of people) got together and decided to commit him. You see, his mother couldn’t stop him doing this (she came up to his chest, barely) and it took several men to restrain him. He was running around naked and heedless of (rare but unpredictable) traffic.
So they got him in one of his good times, and took him by taxi (none of these men owned a car) to the mental hospital where they swore he posed a risk to himself and others. He was committed and I heard recently he died in the hospital (of old age. By “Young” man I suspect my elders meant late thirties.)
Imagine my distress when I found out years later, while doing research, that his symptoms were not of mental illness, but of a stroke.
Was it an injustice? Well, yes. BUT the men were doing the best they could with the knowledge then available. They really couldn’t wait for future knowledge of the human body to be granted them, so they could deal with the poor man’s problem adequately. (I don’t even know if we can “Fix” the issue now. It would involve brain surgery I suspect, and I don’t know how sophisticated we are on that micro a scale.)
What they did was by no means perfect, but it relieved his widowed mother of the necessity to try to wrestle with a man three times her weight. It relieved the village men from having to down tools and leave work in a rush to go restrain him in the middle of the day. It stopped village kids from being exposed to a naked adult male but, more importantly, it stopped them from being trampled. (No, seriously, imagine a man who is more than 300 lbs running, uncontrolled, in a panic. It wasn’t pretty.)
Local solutions aren’t perfect, but they at least will try to achieve concrete goals. (“We need to stop him endangering self and others.”) And they’re usually reluctantly done when they involve drastic measures. No one wants undue harshness brought to bear on them by their neighbors and communities remember how you decided for others.
Yes, this might be impossible in our fragmented, mobile communities. BUT having the decision made by faceless bureaucrats who cannot and do not know how it affects the local community isn’t an improvement. In the situation above, I can well imagine today’s institutions ordering us to let him keep doing what he was doing, or to appoint two slight females at full time pay to help his mother or something equally ridiculous.
Which is what we’re stuck with for assistance to children.
This is made worse the farther way/more different culture the children are. There is this photo essay going around Facebook about “Children in their bedrooms” but, as people who link invariably tell us, “this is about so much more.”
Well, it opens with a photo of an Arab kid from the West bank. Knowing the culture that gave us the term Paliwood for the staged photos of “Israeli atrocities” I immediately felt skeptical at the picture of the kid posed in what appears to be a chicken coup, with a lamb on his shoulders, in typical iconographic fashion.
It soon became obvious that was, in fact, going to be the theme of the essay. Oh, there were a few red herrings thrown in: a child in China, with a massive poster of Mao over his bed. A sofa outdoors in what looked like one of Rio’s Favelas… and such. But then we returned to the theme of the West bank with the photo of an Israeli child (and look, I often see photos of children from Israel – long story – and I’m going to tell you they had to search hard and long not just to find a massively fat one, but one who had a sullen, unpleasant expression with it) in a perfectly decorated bedroom. (He’s not really a child, either. While the other children in the “photo essay” run about six, he’s about 14. Because that will elicit less sympathy.)
At this point, I closed the “photo essay.” I have no clue what all those well intentioned people think the “so much more” this essay says is, but I’m going to tell you what it really says: it says that countries that have issues also have issues caring for their children. No matter how much money you pour into them, none of them will go to the children. It will go instead to pay for rockets with which to attack their neighbors; for “presidential palaces” to impress the fools or, in the case of China, for massive, impressive empty buildings which no one can even live in or to finance US debt – and I leave to you to figure out which use is worse.
Oh, I know what the point of the photos was supposed to be. It was to point out that children were in want and need, while others weren’t. But what THAT is supposed to do, unless it’s assumed that economics is a finite pie and that to give to a child is to take from the other, I don’t know. And no one really believes that. No, not even our ever so bleeding heart liberals. If they did, they’d take the money they use taking their kids on trips abroad and buying them designer outfits, and give it to needy children.
Instead, they look at these photos and feel guilty (because they have the economic sense of my cat, and I might be overestimating) and then want the government to “do something” – which on the international level is even more stupid and dangerous than on the national level.
Those photos were designed to elicit the “make this go away so I don’t have to feel bad” reaction.
And they are designed, planned, and paid for by the governments that won’t look after their children and by their enablers abroad, which are the equivalent of those irresponsible and abusive welfare parents, but armed with rockets which they buy with their international aid WIC cards..
I don’t remember who said that there could be peace in the Middle East when Palestinians loved their children more than they hated Jews, but they were right.
There can also be less suffering to children in Brazil and China when people with power to allocate money think that providing meals, education and care for desperately poor children is more important than another big, showy building.
Dictators and irresponsible poseurs use children to get what they want out of idiots.
That applies on both the national and the international scale.
The only thing we can do is not be idiots.
Looking after children and providing for children is perhaps the deepest instinctive drive of individuals and societies. But sometimes obeying it will only make things worse.
As with the problem of abusive parents I have no solution.
All I can say is that giving money to dictators who hide behind women and children always ends with more dead and abused women and children.
Be aware of how you’re being manipulated and refuse to do anything — from material aid to echoing a facebook photo essay — just to “make the bad feelings go away.”
Sometimes a photo essay is the electronic version of hostages chained to military installations and bomb depots, so that every military strike can be called a war crime.
According To Hoyt 
I once read a fairly poorly written treatment on “libertarian views on hostages”, as to what to do when some bad guy grabs a hostage to extort actions from others. Should the hostage be considered a victim and everything done to protect and rescue him, even to the extent of doing things that harm others, or are wrong? Should the hostage be considered a weapon in the basic idea of the term (as in, why are we worried about the bad guy’s glock in a standoff) and treated as such? No conclusion that I could discover was presented in the essay, and I suppose it would take someone with greater knowledge, philosophy and compassion than what I have to untangle it, but it is an important question. How do we treat the children who are being used a victims to extort behavior and funds from the rest of us?
We turn ourselves inside out to resolve these issues and never get resolution but we get blamed for the ills we strive to fix and never can cure; the ones profiting from our help have no incentive to stop their behavior and do not have any reason to accept their role in it.
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The problem is that people regard life’s problems as if they were math problems: there is one, fixed, right solution, which you can look up in the back of the book, which will SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
Life is not like that. Life is more like Chesterton’s problem:
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I had a lightbulb a while ago–
it’s over simplification,
and
it’s dehumanizing.
Not everything is gray, but not everything is mathematically simple, either.
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I was a nuclear weapons senior custodial agent in the Army, Bob. The way we were trained to deal with people taking hostages, so they could steal a weapon, was to shoot in such a way that most of the hostages were merely wounded, while the terrorists were killed. There are definitely situations where the lives of the hostages, say twenty of them, are not worth ten to a hundred thousand deaths from a 10 kiloton device being detonated in a city. As far as the aid for parents go, when I worked for Florida DCF, we received calls about moms using all of their child support for trips to the nail and hair fixers, and ignoring the kids completely. Even worse were the parents who sold their EBT cards to dealers for Coke or Meth, while the kids turned to skin and bones. Some were rotten parents who were not going to change, no matter how much we talked to them. And yes, I was sickened by the kids who got taken from parents for nothing, punishments my own parents would have dealt out (and mine were good parents), while other kids died because they were left with the psychopaths who had made them.
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I was sitting in a Waffle House several months ago, and this woman called, asking about her EBT card, which she had left on the table the night before (no one knows why she had it out). She was told it was there, but she would have to wait for a manager to come in, so she could get it, because it was locked in the office. She demanded that they have it ready for her by the time she got there, or she was going to call the police.
She showed up later, was told again that there was not a manager on duty, but one would be in around 6:00PM. She argued until they called the manager and explained the problem. Apparently, the manager said she would come in, but wasn’t sure how long it would take. The woman had some choice words, then told them, “My friend and I are going to the tanning salon, when we get back, the manager better be here, or I’ll call the police. I have to have that card to feed my kids when I pick them up later.”
If it weren’t for the fact that when I get angry, I get inarticulate, I would have stood up and reamed that woman a new one. GOING TO THE TANNING SALON??!? You could take the damn money you’re going to blow on the tanning salon and feed your kids, b*tch!
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“And before you say that orphanages were uniformly bad – I’m sure a lot of them WERE. BUT all of them?”
I spent a little time in an orphanage in a former soviet block country (not Russia) a decade ago when my wife and I adopted our son. He was 2 1/2 at the time. The orphanage was built in 1939 under Stalin. There was a plaque in the lobby with Uncle Joe’s picture that said so.
Before we left the US, I had heard horror stories about what to expect. And while the conditions weren’t up to Westerrn standards, I was surprised at how good they were. Yes, the children didn’t always get enough to eat, but they were fed daily.
They weren’t living in squalor. The carpets, while worn, were clean. So was the bedroom filled with beds, which we were allowed to see. The children had clean clothes. Not new or fancy, but clean and free of holes and tears. And while my son was wearing a sweater that looked like it was intended for a girl (pink cute animal on the front), it fit and kept him warm.
Furthermore, the orphanage had a play room with mats and other soft play equipment. It also had a music room. A lady came in three times a week and held classes. We were allowed to observe one. I was impressed. I suspect this is why my son has always been interested in music.
This was an example of state run child care where the state was getting at least some things right. I shudder to think how our government would run the facility. If it could be run something like this, I wouldn’t object too much to the state doing this here.
Fortunately, I know there are some private organizations in my area that take care of children (house, clothe, feed, tutor, etc.) and do a good job. My wife works for one. It’s faith-based. The people who live and work there genuinely care for the children (there are house parents), which is more than can be said for government run bureaucracies.
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Yes. My mom’s friend was raised in a faith based institution too, and it was good. I know they aren’t, uniformly, good — human right? — but again, how bad do they have to be before they match a merry-go-round of families where even the good ones are temporary, and there are far too many bad ones?
As for the orphanage in Russia, there were probably bad ones, some places, but again… human…
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Indeed, when the orphanages allow the children to form relations with the staff and the other children, they turn out just fine.
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My husband was raised as a foster child. He was fortunate, but still has problems with certain family type things.
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Variation occurred. I’ve heard of an adopting couple arriving at an orphanage where none of the babies cried. Ever. They had learned the crying got no results.
They got to know the kids they were adopting, playing with them and stuff, and just before they had to leave to for the paperwork, one of the kids cried out as they left. It shocked them. (They were able to bring them home.)
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IIRC Newt Gingrich grew up in an orphanage and recalled it pretty fondly. A friend of mine’s husband and his siblings were “given” to an orphanage because their dad disappeared and their mom could not support all five of them. She hated doing it, but the kids agreed that she’d done the right thing: none of them starved or went naked. Again, this was a faith-based home that is still in business and has a good regional reputation.
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Every time I hear about a wonderful, faith-based orphanage, I remember the ones shut down over in the US because of the yelling that they didn’t adopt out to gay couples (and it turned out to be false, I recall, as there were faith based orphanages willing to adopt out to gays provided the prospective parents were willing to raise them in the faith.) But nooo, they had to close them down because of the desires of certain ‘adults’ and had no consideration whatsoever for the welfare of the children. The people deciding these things aren’t interested in the children except as pawns, markers on a game table. The very thought of such enrages me, because of the damage that they do in their ‘well meaning’ attempts to make everyone come from the same gingerbread mold.
On a slight, but related tangent, I had to explain recently how and why there still existed teenagers who were able to ‘resist their hormones and biology’ in the Philippines. This was the result of shock and disbelief in learning that one of the young girls in the gaming clan was so innocent/naive/sheltered that she didn’t know what erotica was – and that she was essentially being sexually groomed by someone she considered a friend. (Yes, I explained what erotica was to her, and advised the girl to tell her father what the guy’s been up to.)
I was telling my hubby about the shock and he shrugged and said “if they can imagine a world with no safety nets for single parents, no abortion, the diseases and a lot of social stigma, then yeah, they have a LOT of reason why they don’t go sex crazy. That’s not even counting their responsibilities and upbringing.” He seemed to be annoyed at the thought that everyone with Western upbringing was supposed to be hormonal, brainless idiots who cared about nothing but their own self gratification (and to that, I recall the hilarious but point-making video where they have teenagers doing exactly that wander onto a seaside bomb testing area and die horribly) because it implies everyone raised in a Western society is a sex obsessed moron with zero capacity for self control.
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When you say groomed, what do you mean? I’ve heard it referenced before, but I have no idea what to watch for, and I’d like to be prepared in looking out for my minions. We’ve dealt with some creepy older kid behaviors before, and it’s made me even warier than my already paranoid normal.
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Sexual grooming? Basically teaching someone that certain sexual and social behaviors are normal, okay, desirable and accepted. This is to lower the target’s resistance to the behaviors and then eventually have them participate, either through coercion or ‘convincing’ them to participate ‘to be part of the group’. The target is then made emotionally trapped to the persons responsible, through social guilt tripping, fear and similar.
In the case of this girl, a 16 year old with a very sheltered upbringing, she was given 50 Shades of Gray (which, I hear, is, summarized and broadstroked, a BSDM sex-slave abuse-relationship with no safewords and little consent turned into a romance novel and pretty much porn) to read. She read all three and said she didn’t like how the girl was treated. She was told that it was a good story, and since she trusted the person giving it to her, she read it. The subsequent books she was given were all erotica in some form or another, with similar themes of submission. She’d also expressed several times that she wasn’t happy when the guy would make comments about her body, like ‘honey thighs’. The guy has a girlfriend, and she felt compliments should be directed at the girlfriend, not her, but didn’t know how to tell him to stop because she didn’t want to lose the only friend she had.
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Okay, got it. Ugh.
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That’s just… how could anyone… I…
I’m grateful I can’t afford airfare.
So is my lawyer.
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And if you’re looking at that, then looking at the Planned Parenthood funded “sex ed” where little kids are told they should “explore” and “have fun with” their private areas, welcome to the ranks of the solidly creeped out.
Never mind the stuff that was mainlined when I was a young teen just under twenty years ago, where we were encouraged to “explore” our “new feelings” and “exercise” the “new options.” AKA, if you feel the slightest impulse to do something, don’t hold back– and it’s really easy to get girls to believe sex is affection, and guys to believe that if they don’t want sex they are defective.
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I’m confused, too. Groomed for sex by being kept from erotica?
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The girl was sheltered by her family and environment, but being taught bad stuff by her “friend.” The proverbial bad company, in fact. The problem is that innocence tends to see everybody else as basically good and good-intentioned. Reading true crime or hearing a lot of murder ballads, that might help make her a bit more suspicious. Part of why I think kids should read classic mystery.
Btw, Crunchyroll.com is legally simulcasting the new Kindaichi Casebook anime (clumsily called The File of Kindaichi in translation). It is pretty much pure classic mystery. I know some folks here enjoy that, so I thought I’d let the non-anime watchers have a heads-up.
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er… yeah. Sorry about that, and thanks for explaining. I’d spent a good chunk of today talking with the girl, and my English suffered a bit.
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I was reading a piece from (IIRC) “The Nation” complaining about how the totalitarian leftists are driving the liberals out by shouting down anyone who does not agree with their exact subset of ideology. As you say, the children are being made to suffer because some religious care groups don’t always agree with the hardest-core homosexual activists. And I’m sorry to say, some of those homosexual couples that DID adopt have turned out to be just as problematic as the anti-h-adoption people claimed. And don’t get me started on the utter foolishness of “whites can only adopt white children, only blacks can adopt black children” and so on.
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And I’m sorry to say, some of those homosexual couples that DID adopt have turned out to be just as problematic as the anti-h-adoption people claimed.
That’s the first I’ve heard about the results of allowing them to adopt. I haven’t been able to find any follow-ups on those and I tried.
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If it’s against the narrative, the media suppress:
http://www.rpvnetwork.org/profiles/blogs/gay-adoption-horror-duke
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…excuse me. I need to get up and punch a few things that aren’t expensive and won’t be broken, like a pillow. I am literally shaking in rage.
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Sick beyond sick. I can think of one ‘treatment’ with 0% recidivism for child rapists: supersonic lead injection.
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Obviously, you would expect the normal range of humans, so there are going to be bad gay couples just as there are straight.
The only thing specific to gay couples, whether with adopted children, or their own through artificial insemination, that I’ve heard is that many of the children feel pressured to select same sex partners, even if they don’t want to. I can’t find the article right now, but I remember that some said it was overt pressure, and some said it was more of an expectation without specific pressures being applied.
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Yep, I don’t disagree with the ‘bad gays, same as there are bad heterosexuals’ – I’m more enraged about the fact that these are the ones screwing it up so badly (pun unintended) for the good ones.
Before the whole ‘your rights are less than mine’ attitude that seems prevalent these days in the LGBT movement that has me turning against the whole thing, the only concern I did have was that the children would be pressured themselves, to be gay. I was constantly told that would not be the case. So I would be interested if you found the article, but if you can’t, no worries.
As for my own beliefs, I strongly believe that if one wants equal rights then this is a concession that this person is willing to give those equal rights to the other person, as well as the freedom of association inherent in such. To that, there is always some discrimination (which is not a bad word in my dictionary) – but gays don’t have to adopt from religiously run orphanages, or get married in the faiths that don’t allow them to, and if they choose to freaking work in a Catholic institution, they voluntarily forsake their screaming about their sexuality and while working there shouldn’t marry their partners. If only they had the collective balls to try reform the Muslim religion on that score, I might see them less as cowardly bullies with legal threat on their side, but they don’t and thus I see the advocates as cowardly bullies. Individually? I’ll treat them the way I treat any other person – based on how they behave toward me and how they conduct themselves in society. So if someone is a jerkass I will treat them as such, regardless of skin color, religious affiliation or sexual identity.
Treating people like people doesn’t seem to be what they want these days…
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Pretty much agree.
The other thing that concerns me about gay adoption is the vetting. It’s always been the case that the adoption agency agents give the prospective adopting couple a metaphorical colonoscopy before signing off. Are they as thorough with gays?
“If I deny this gay couple, will they sue? Will they drag me to court and brand me a homophobe? That’s a career killer!”
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From the article linked above:
One of the most shocking
cases comes from the UK where Ian Wathey, 41, was jailed for five years
and his partner, Craig Faunch, 32, for six years after being found guilty of
several counts of involving the abuse of four boys aged between eight
and 14. This was the first gay male couple in the UK to be approved for
foster care. Social workers said that they were afraid of being labeled
homophobes and ignored some signs that would’ve otherwise indicated
abuse.
The answer, it seems is ‘no, they’re not being as thorough with the metaphorical colonoscopy.’ In short, the attempt to bring back the acceptance of pederasty as it was in the fabled shining era of gay acceptance, in Greece, is well and truly underway. Gay agenda ++ uber alles, is my impression, and hey, if a few children get hurt along the way, the left isn’t really interested in children anyway. It’s post-birth abortion. Amirite?
The whole thing is making me sick.
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There have been a couple of murdered kids, and some indication of way above average rape rates. Usually takes a LOT of searching before you find out they were adopted by a same sex couple. Nobody wants to report it because it won’t help the kids, and it will end your career.
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So much for ‘for the children’ it seems, when the sexual identity of the ‘adoptive parents’ = protection from scrutiny or criticism.
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Pretty much all the stuff involved is focused on the adults going me, me, me, sadly.
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Gay couples adopting newborns is ridiculous. There’s a huge waitlist for newborns – even ones with severe birth defects like spinal bifida.
We’ve gone crazy – adoption is about fairness to the babies, not the parents. Should unemployed people be put on the waitlist? No. How fair is that? It’s fair to the adoptee!
My uncle was adopted in 1930. Rules were he had to have his own bedroom. The subsequent kids my grandparents had all had to share bedrooms, but not my uncle – it was a sane and reasonable contract.
Children benefit from having a mother and a father. (90% of convicted violent felons grew up with no father – it’s important.)
Gays can adopt older kids – no waitlist there, and a loving home is better than foster care!
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Then there’s Dad’s Roommate which assures the picture-book-aged child that sleep in the same bed with someone is love.
You know, “You don’t love me if you don’t let me do this” is a favorite pedophile line, but that book is used in schools because they would rather groom kids to be molested than reject a pro-homosexual book.
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… ‘You don’t love me if you don’t let me do this.’
Yeah, it really isn’t looking out for the kids any more. Who was it who posted about the institutionalized pedophilia that went on in East Germany? The one that made me remember and finally understand what I saw happening to one of my friends?
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The happiest seeming kids I’ve ever seen were at an orphanage near Leh, in Ladakh. (Himalayan India.) Maybe it was because they’d never seen a television. Gave them a couple frisbees, they were over the moon.
Buddhist place. They slept on mats on the floor, five or six to a room. But they were well supervised, well fed, clothed warmly, and educated at the Buddhist Day School next door.
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A friend of mine has spent an extraordinary amount of time in Haiti. By profession he’s a water and sanitation engineer, so his skills are in high demand here in the States, but he often travels abroad to use his skills.
A couple years back, he was back here in North Dakota for the holidays, and he told me from his experiences in Haiti, the worst thing we do as Americans is give charity money.
He went on to explain that charity groups down there consider it a business — how much money can they get from the States? Further, there are gangs that attempt to blackmail anyone working down there for US cash. He’s literally been told to pay them off or they won’t allow him to work in an area.
Instead, he advocates hands-on work, with a twist. When he moves into an area in Haiti, he finds and recruits local Haitians who have an interest in improving their community. He then trains them in how to design, build, and maintain water and sanitation systems.
He’s more than capable of doing all that himself, of course, but he’s told me that if he builds them a system and leaves, he can come back in a year and it’ll be completely destroyed because there’s no local investment in it.
Too often, we think we’re helping by giving money – it soothes our conscious. In reality, we’ve often done nothing helpful.
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A reliable supply of clean water is one of those critical things we take for granted here in the US.
I do recall as a small child driving cross country on the old two lane US highways every town we passed through had a welcome sign and a “water supply state approved” sign, so not that long ago it was still an important consideration here as well.
Still is of course, but it’s one of those things kids just don’t take into consideration. Clean pure water out of the tap is a natural right after all, isn’t it? Sure it is, and the drinking of beer and wine by children in Europe is purely a cultural thing too, or just maybe a holdover from a time when you really could not trust the water.
And, yes, give a community a working water system and someone will come along and tear it apart to sell the pieces or just to demonstrate their power over the people. Supply the means and know how for them to build it themselves and they will defend what they’ve made with great ferocity.
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I recently pointed out to some people who were getting sniffy about the problems of people with higher incomes than they got that if they had clean tap water and more calories to eat than they needed on a regular basis, they too should not think of themselves as having problems.
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My friend is an infrequent blogger, but here’s an excerpt taken from this post: http://theredhatwaterguy.blogspot.com/2013/04/busted.html
“I have spent countless hours on the water systems for Pignon and Hinche. But neither has a drop of water flowing in them. The reason… people living near the spring want a highway built to their remote villages so they dug up the pipe and smashed it. The pipe was repaired and they smashed it again. It is incomprehensible to me how such a small group of people can be so selfish that they would cut off the water supply to tens of thousands of people just so they can have a smoother, wider road built to their remote villages.
…
In Verrettes, Petite Riviere and St Michel rural villagers have also sabotaged the water systems to prevent water from reaching the city. They either smashed holes in the pipe or there are broken water taps at critical low points in the supply pipeline causing all of the pressure to be lost in the system.
In yet another small village outside of St Michele we witnessed a water system missing just 2 pieces of pipe. Rather than organize and repair the system at a cost of perhaps $1,000 the entire village of 1,000 plus people hikes over a thousand vertical feet up the mountain to collect and carry every drop of water they need for drinking, bathing and doing laundry. If repaired the water system would deliver water to a system of public taps a mere stones throw from each of their front doors.
…
Haiti it seems is so completely messed up it’s hard to imagine what if any good my work here is doing. But somewhere deep down I know I’m doing the right thing so I guess I’ll just keep on keeping on. “
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I sincerely hope that rather than letting his frustration burn out his enthusiasm your friend moves on to find people who will appreciate his efforts.
As for those who refuse to better themselves or even allow others to do so for them, the old phrase “you made your bed now lie in it” comes to mind.
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“It is incomprehensible to me how such a small group of people can be so selfish that they would cut off the water supply to tens of thousands of people just so they can have a smoother, wider road built to their remote villages.”
The water helps those OTHER people. The highway helps THEM.
They’re… primitive. Not as a result of genetics, but upbringing and culture. They’re looters; if the other guy is well-off, they see themselves as poorer. It never occurs to them that both sides can benefit.
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Yes and no, Uncle Lar.
Here in Taiwan, the water from the tap has been treated minimally. It’s clear, looks good, but don’t drink it. Safe to drink after boiling, or after you buy a fancy filtering system of your own. It works.
Nobody raised in a culture like this would think of drinking tap water anywhere in the world – like trusting a bureaucrat to pack your parachute.
Americans mop their floors and flush their toilets with expensively treated potable water. Americans water their lawns and golf courses and fill their swimming pools and put out fires with expensively treated potable water. Advanced, or wasteful?
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Advanced, or wasteful?
Um… Yes?
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:-)
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Mostly from simplicity of design, since you don’t want two systems, and and if you have sufficient water it is not horribly expensive to treat it all no matter what the use is – it avoids outbreaks of various fevers, diseases and diarrheas from accidental ingestion or using the wrong water to wash in. Treating is now done by chlorine, ozone or UV treatments depending on conditions and energy availability. We use a lot of chlorine now because it is more robust and most systems were built specifically for it.
Water systems were a concern for cities where I grew up in the Willamette Valley. The clay soil grows decent crops but is a terrible aquifer. Cities moved and whithered in the 1800’s when wells were not sufficient for the population, and came back when civic water systems were built or extended. Good water and good transportation meant a successful town here once upon a time.
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Thanks, that was informative.
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And to follow up, I spoke with my Brother-in-law who used to work for city public works. Some cities do have separate mains for the fire hydrants, and don’t treat that water system.
And a third follow up, Chlorine treatment keeps working in a way even if you have a fracture in a pipe that might leak tainted water into a system. Ozone and UV won’t provide that extra bit of insurance, though they have less odor. Nowadays I understand they mostly use sand filters and O2 treatment mostly in digesting the sludge but also use UV and ozone to treat sewage in the final “release to the wild” of the process water.
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It’s like why the drive-up ATMs have Braille on them. This means that the factories need only one set of molds and to keep track of one set of orders. Banks have only to order as many as they need and not worry about mixing them up, or that they have only the wrong type of button to fix a problem.
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I horrified some Americans by filling my water bottle and drinking from the nice little spigot on the side of fountains in France and Germany. Pointing out the “potable water” signs made no difference. Cultural difference, learned in my case (and h-ck, the water was free from the fountains, unlike the $$ bottled stuff in the shops.)
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My dad has a similar theory about food aid– he’s a rancher who grew up farming.
Best thing you can do is teach people how to apply the best possible techniques for the area… and arm them to be able to keep what they grow. (That last one is reserved for safe company.)
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Good Lord, could you imagine the sounds coming out of New York city if it got out that USAID was going into poor areas, teaching the locals modern farming, and dropping off a bag of seeds, a rifle, and a brick of ammunition? It would be…glorious.
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Someone is trying to argue with me on FB, which I don’t do. But if any of you on FB wants to go smack, feel free…
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Man, why do I have to be at work?
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:D
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As i said in another of Sarah’s posts, the best aid for places like this would be old tractors and instruction on their use.
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One of the formative books that I read as a child was a Reader’s Digest Condensed version of The Ugly American, which drove that point home – the only way to truly help is to create or teach ways for groups to care for themselves. If you do it for them, or give them a solution that depends on outside help, they will resent you, and never develop their independence.
Years later, in college, I took a class on community organizing. This was before that field came to prominence, and I didn’t really know what I was getting into; I very quickly started referring to it as Rabble Rousing 101. I had two textbooks. One was what you would expect: an ACORN- and ANSWER-praising screed that railed against the evils of the “white Christian male hegemony”. It flew across the room many times, and I got rid of it as fast as I could once the class was done. The other was a surprise. It was written by a husband and wife who had worked for decades in Catholic social services. Their whole focus is on identifying a community’s strengths and needs, and then using those strengths or developing new ones within the community to address the needs, with little temporary and no long-term involvement of outsiders. That book is still in my collection, and I consider it a near priceless resource.
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“Positive deviance” has seen some good results. If the poor kids are malnourished, hunt about until you find some poor kids who aren’t, find out how their parents are doing it in the very same community, and teach others to do likewise.
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There’s a book I’m itching to buy from Amazon called A Framework for Understanding Poverty, by Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D. Supposedly it talks about how intergenerational poverty is perpetuated by following cultural mores, and how to teach new mores to overcome that poverty.
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I had to read “A People’s History” for my Western Civ class in college. And write a short paper on it (and two other books). My paper on it ended up taking specific instances, with citations, from the book and citing evidence that he was wrong. This book has been reserved for special purposes.
One of the other books, I was supposed to pick three inventions it talks about that have had a fundamental effect on humanity. I ended up picking two from the book, and one i felt it didn’t cover adequately- the microprocessor. (which got, iirc, one paragraph.)
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The parish I used to belong to, helped a Haitian parish. What money was donated, went for specific projects. The built a school, paid for books, and the building, and helped pay teachers. They also raised mi=oney to pay for replacing a truck to carry items to “town.” (I don’t recall which one.) The Parish was way back in the mountains,
For many years, I’ve had a specific project in mind, if I ever hit the lottery for “really big” money. Find a bamboo species that will thrive in Haiti, set up something like Heifer project, using bamboo for building, and anything else it can be used for. It would be set through a group like Catholic Charities, or similar. No cash, except for couple of experts to oversee.
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I have spoken to several people who have been to Haiti on various projects. I have come to conclusion that nothing can be done to improve Haiti. Its a terminal case of poisoned culture and will never be able to rise above it.
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I have heard “it’s for the children” so many times that the gag reflex is almost automatic.
It isn’t just foreign politicians using the phrase to leverage the transfer of wealth into their own coffers, but it’s a favorite of our very own lib/prog doofuses as well.
I watched in the aftermath of Sandy Hook with the blood of those poor children still wet when all the usual suspects immediately trotted out all their pet gun control bills that by sheer coincidence they had all prepped and ready to run with. When you could pin them down the more honest would admit that their proposals would have in no way shape or form done anything to prevent the latest tragedy, but would quickly state that it was important legislation anyway, some version of “we need to pass this quickly, we can worry about the details after it’s law.”
Never a hint of shame that they were dancing in the blood of innocent victims to further their own goals. Never. Not once.
One of the more popular common remarks in the current ACA debacle is “do you want health care of the same quality as a typical DMV visit?” When child welfare is decided by thieving politicians and a massive impenetrable bureaucracy much the same question should be asked. Perfection is a never to be achieved goal here on human populated Earth, but decisions made at the local micro level at least tend to retain a bit of humanity and human compassion. Not always, and always with room for debate, but still and all better than the alternatives we seem to have latched onto.
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In my more ruthless moods I come up with all sorts of ideas. What a friend who worked in retail (and had to deal with shoplifters) called “customer servicing them to death”. He couldn’t accuse someone of shoplifting until they had done it, but he could follow them around and “help” them until it was made very clear they were being watched and they would leave because they couldn’t steal anything. Never anything that could possibly be construed as harassment, mind, just being a too-persistent salesman.
I think something like that needs to happen with welfare. Everybody makes mistakes, child #1 can count as an honest oops. But by the time you get to child #3 and still the hand is out, I think as the one paying I get to set some rules. More children should equal more oversight, to the point where it isn’t worth the extra money. Yeah, I know there aren’t enough social workers now. These benefits get used somehow, don’t they? make that the pain point. Make the users have to jump through more and more hoops, cut off the desirable things and only provide the basics (no more buying whatever is in the store. Very limited list of staples, none of which have high resale value. No soda, for example). Make the rules more onerous the more benefits are used.
Then when I really channel Attila the Hun, I think there should be a way to require some kind of birth control for continued benefits. And it would be completely possible to refuse, of course–but then the benefits stop, and if you can’t feed your children they get taken away AND you don’t get funds for having more kids. I’ve seen too many horror stories of children permanently damaged or dying because of neglectful parents on assistance. Even an orphanage would be a step up from that. And maybe if the link between making babies and getting money is broken, the number of abused children will drop too.
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There are plentiful social workers. We know because they can harass a family and even seize the kid because they are following one doctor’s recommendations, and another doctor reported them. They just need to be redirected.
The problem is that social workers justify their jobs by their caseloads. You want them to work themselves out of job.
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They seem to find endless time and energy to harass law-abiding and stable families. I am talking about multiple cases in Washington State where child neglect was reported and had a case worker but the child ended up dead between visits because the case worker had “too many cases”. But we can combine our approaches, and make it painful for the lazy social workers TOO. There are very good ones, that care. They seem to get swamped. The bad ones like to throw their weight around vs. actually help people.
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I’m not certain of any (reliable) statistics more recent than the mid-1980s, but social worker burn-out was averaging between three and five years at that time. (And most of those still on the job after eight or ten were demonstrably “phoning it in” way too often to be called effective or meaningfully efficient, in my opinion.) Case loads have only gone up since then, to the extent where non-degreed workers in field assignments are increasingly accepted.
My eldest son is one of those field workers, with university coursework under his belt but still short of a degree in social sciences or psychology. He is trained now as an HVAC technician, in part because of the increasing levels of idiot-work required to “support the clients” yet which really only consists of more restrictive / semantically-disconnected forms to be filled & filed. Only waiting until a heating and A/C company has an opening, or he can amass the funds to open his own HVAC business. Not quite functionally burned-out from social work, but there are days he sounds far too close.
Full disclosure: my degree is in Psychology. Even used it professionally, prior to becoing a computer geek via the hard-science coursework I also completed…
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In spite of Leslie Fish’s odd politics, this one seems appropriate to what you are saying in your first paragraph about burnout.
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I’ve had the pleasure of knowing the Fish off and on for over 20 years (I first actually met my lovely bride at her filk circle at the 2000 Worldcon). Leslie’s politics are odd… but only to the extent that she is Left without being unrealistic about human nature…. and willing to leave people the hell alone.
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Actually I think that someone who can’t support herself and has a kid falls under the laws already in place about people who can’t control themselves and constitute a danger to themselves or others. For her — and the father — maybe the first one is allowed, but the second one should make the presumption irrebuttable.
Not only would it protect those who really can’t control themselves, and their children, but I suspect we would find an amazing large group could control themselves.
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You know, some sort of Assisted Living facility might work, while also reducing the abuse of kids… instead of getting money, you can move into the facility where you have a room with beds and a bathroom per family, and they serve food. Folks with known issues get help. That would work for a lot of social security disabled folks with no family, too. Use military barracks designs and standards. Probably have to have secure storage, plus locking closets…..
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That’s basically a workhouse, isn’t it? My knowledge of history is spotty, thanks to factory schools.
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I believe work houses also provided a job, and that all-encompassing thing is why it was so easy to abuse. (Kind of like company stores.)
It’s more like a barracks based group home for the developmentally disabled– which is exactly what mixed in my head to come up with the idea.
Well, that and a really funny picture of “tips” for passing barracks inspections in the Marines. Such as doing the Hotel Fold on the toilet paper… and pinning it with the eagle globe and anchor from your uniform spares. (Someone else suggested having Sinatra and complementary mints.)
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Look up the Salvation Army Carey Houses :)
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There are some good Catholic homes for abandoned mothers, too.
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Out in the countryside, far from any village even, so they can’t easily get access to drugs or chances for free-lance work to get what they really want.
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But then they can’t ever get back on their feet, either.
Maybe strict enforcement of drug laws would help, too.
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Are they ever going to get back on their feet? Especially if they can go for drugs? The most libertarian society ever would have to do something with legally incompetent adults.
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If we’re offering a halfway house, it has to not be a poisoned pill; we have to make sure it’s not the trap that the current system is, no matter how much some folks LIKE that trap.
If they’re actually so incompetent that they need to be locked up, then have a thickly hedged system and do it– but if there’s any chance that folks can pull themselves up……
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I’m familiar with a few sheltered workshops attached to living facilities (Hope Haven in Iowa, AdVo in Texas) where people who need supervision can work basic, menial production jobs, earn some money, and live as independently as possible. At Hope Haven, they hire people with physical disabilities as floor supervisors in the shop when possible, so they can stay off the county rolls if they choose to. It’s not perfect at either place, but the local communities supported both operations and those working get the sense of accomplishing things and earning their own keep (as much as they can).
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One of the few gov’t buying programs I really like is that a lot of the Navy’s stuff is from something like “Lighthouse for the Blind”– disabled workshops.
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I used to get some good things from them. I think they are doing freeze-dried spices as well.
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At the current moment, a trap that traps only the current generation, who are prevented from perpetuating their problems, is an improvement on what we’ve got, which traps three or four generations — thus far.
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But welfare reform helped that– until it was gutted, and people fell back in. My mom watched it happen!
We can’t fix it entirely, but we can improve things.
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Very simple change– you may see at the store where a lot of basics are labeled “WIC approved.”
Make it so food stamps in whatever form only work for WIC stuff.
Milk, flour, eggs, cheese, fresh veggies, pasta, pasta sauce….
Maybe require a basic cooking class as part of getting food assistance, too. With a PRACTICAL test at the end, which you can demonstrate proficiency in to get out of doing.
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They buy them and exchange them for what they really want.
Though even that much inconvenience is probably to the good.
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Advantage being that WIC stuff is at least very low value– and if they fixed it so that refunds go back to the card account, yay!
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Not at the same store.
‘It works like this: Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.””
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367903/white-ghetto-kevin-d-williamson/page/0/1
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Just a year or two ago, they caught a place that was doing a 50c on the dollar for cash translation of EBT, and that was only after YEARS of them being reported on it.
Still, milk is a lot harder to barter than soda.
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Powdered milk — used to cut drugs.
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Good ideas: I like when Attila gets channelled.
But we’re asking grocery checkout clerks to enforce the law as is – your plan there would make that worse. Imagine being shouted at all day for refusing to swipe soda and chocolate on a food-stamp card.
The Dems have been working feverishly to take the stigma out of dependency, and it’s so destructive. Stamps should be stamps, not credit cards. And the Ag Dep’t shouldn’t be swelling their baseline budget by advertising stamps. Insane.
Let ’em use their bloated budget to set up special food-stamp-only stores. Milk, bread, rice, ground chuck, fresh & frozen veggies. No sweets, no soda, no microwave-dinners-for-the-gal-on-the-go. Let the Ag Dep’t staff them, too.
Non-government groceries shouldn’t have to accept government promises as payment. Yes, all currency is just a government promise, as Lazarus “Woodrow Wilson” Long points out (should have figured from that that the author was a Dem!), but you know what I mean.
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But we’re asking grocery checkout clerks to enforce the law as is – your plan there would make that worse. Imagine being shouted at all day for refusing to swipe soda and chocolate on a food-stamp card.
If the computer won’t allow it to be charged to the card, then the clerk can just point to that. I don’t have a problem with the card system, actually. It reduces costs for the system (at least theoretically). The main problem is the expansion of what the system will allow to be paid for with them. As you say, they have been taking the stigma out of dependency, but they have also been adding things to the list of what is acceptable to pay for, so the dependent will be more comfortable in their dependency.
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They still get shouted at, Wayne. For not selling beer. It’s a horrible system.
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My point is that being able to point to the computer as the culprit gives the checkout person a psychological support to lean on. I’ve been there, maybe not in that exact scenario, but with people yelling at me to do things that are explicitly forbidden by the rules, and it makes a huge difference.
Basically, by taking away the choice element for the clerk, it turns it from refusing to do so into explaining that there’s nothing that can be done, which is far less difficult to deal with, and requires far less willpower.
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I have a problem with these “save the children” ads — and now they are using the same style of blackmail on SPCA ads. I don’t do well with emotional blackmail–ever. Usually I tighten my purse because it means someone wants to put their hand in it.
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Yep.
Folks you can trust with your donations wouldn’t be lying to you to get them.
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These guys are great: http://cure.org/
Very low overhead. Surgery, cured, and done. They do clubfoot operations all over Africa, Central & South America. And they don’t seem to guilt people the way you describe.
Salvation Army is also great. Those colonels and generals – never catch them partying with the Kardashians!
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I met one of those doctors in the early 80s. He went to South America every couple of years to treat cleft palates — good people.
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Agreed. I go local, or help groups recommended by people I trust. The lower key organizations seem to do a lot more with each dollar, without either guilting the donors or leaving the “beneficiaries” in worse shape.
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Golda Meir
I knew a woman who was orphan trained west in Canada. Although in her case there was occasional tension between roles as farm hand and family member ultimately it was family member that is remembered.
I know there must be better ways to do it… maybe offering some kind of a barracks setup for people who really need it.
Heck, we could even fix things a little by having food help being in the form of food, and have the food subsidies to control price be in the form of the gov’t buying stuff to make into those food things.
Yeah, it’d still be abused. I remember when I was a kid mom would sometimes “trade” help with folks and come home with gov’t peanut butter. Right now, I am effusive in my thanks to a friend of a friend who gives me the baby food she gets for her kids– if I didn’t take it, she’d throw it away because it comes with the stuff she actually wants. I hope that the folks who pick it up from the food bank I take it from actually use it.
(Reading between the lines, she was doing it because they needed help, and there was a reason that I can’t remember actually opening any of the containers. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we always had enough to eat– yay, ranching. I recently found out that the special treat of what looked like wing drummettes was probably rabbit, and she was afraid we’d get upset about eating bunnies. Even though we had a blast shooting jackrabbits… eh, she was probably being sensible. Wow, that was a big digression even for me.)
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My Nana lived with us, and as a result I apparently had government cheese as a child. (Her Social Security benefits came partly as surplus food, but because of her health issues, she couldn’t eat them. So my parents, to help her keep her dignity, would “buy” them off her with food she could eat. I suspect they also supplemented her food budget that way.)
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That’s pretty much where I think it should go. Every week you show up at the welfare office, you get a quick physical, drug test, and contraception check, you check the list of offered classes (cooking, vo-tech, basic plumbing, etc.) to see if there’s anything you’re interested in, and you pick up your box of food for the week. Things like beans, flour, fruits and vegetables, milk, cheese.
There’s no shame in being poor, but there’s no great honor in it either. If you want soda, earn the money with which to buy it.
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I cannot agree with the contraception thing.
Ignoring the various health problems– I cannot condone tying using contraception to feeding the kids.
Likewise sterilizing anybody.
Other than that, and that I’d require a practical test or taking the cooking class, agreed.
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If you aren’t responsible enough to take care of your existing responsibilities, you have no business bringing further responsibilities into the world. I agree with you 100% on the sterilizing people, there’s nothing about poverty that makes is a necessarily permanent condition. You should be able to have the contraceptive removed on demand, but you don’t get any welfare the next week.
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We’ve got an inherent difference of opinion on birth control– I think that requiring it would be along the lines of removing the children of those who take public assistance, and you seem to hold it along the lines of passing a drug test.
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We differ on when life (i.e. rights) begin. I put it at some ill-defined point between conception and birth, closer to the former than the latter. Contraception poses no great moral difficulty for me, though I can understand (but not agree) why others might see it differently.
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The problem is that your forced contraception idea would make some people choose between obeying God and eating, while rewarding people with no conscience problems or religious objections. It would also be unduly burdensome to virgins and others not engaging in sex, including those too ill to do so.
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Well, nothing would prevent religious organizations from offering their own charity with whatever strings they feel appropriate. The entire point is to make being on public assistance so onerous that anyone on it would use all of their knowledge and talents to get off of it as quickly as possible.
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It’s not obvious to me that making criminal activity the economically rational behavior in the circumstances is better for society. Maybe so.
It’s also not obvious to me given the expressed point what the tools are. In the context of this discussion.
I am reminded of an experiment, mostly by Chicago Public Schools and Chicago social services.
The experiment was a try to end a generatonal cycle of welfare by separating out a nuclear family and furnishing absolutely everything external the family needed for a more or less middle class life (Insty’s fallacy) – car, house in a good neighborhood, easy non-demanding job to start and all the rest.
They picked a student who was meeting teacher’s expectations in a very low performing school – mostly by being well behaved rather than learning. The student was from a multigenerational all welfare all the time family of women sharing welfare housing and welfare food as an extended family. The student was placed in a magnet school and met the teacher’s expectations for high performance.
The student’s mother was separated from her own mother, sisters and other family members in a nice subsidized home of her own paid for by the job of driving a school bus.
A year later the mother had returned to the bosom of her family – finding it uncomfortable to be away from a familiar setting and also finding it impossible to meet any sort of required schedule for work or getting her own child to school on time or much of anything. The child was still meeting teacher’s expectations back in a trap of low expectations no real education school where she’d started – despite having shown by performance the innate ability to outperform.
I’m not willing to support a policy of floggings will continue until morale improves but I don’t have any better suggestions. Reminds me that it’s been shown that kids take scared straight as a dare so that any intervention has been shown to produce more criminal activity than no intervention at all.
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Starting to sound kind of like how if I object to my kids being taught atheism and hedonism in public school, I can pay for them to go somewhere else…..
Still the big problem of piling at the absolute minimum hormone issues on one sex as a requirement for public assistance. (No, I wouldn’t be cool with trying to blow male hormones all to heck in hope of preventing them from being horndogs, either.)
Idea is to reduce gov’t power and ability to be abused, no?
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I spent a little too much time around people who would refuse to take a class to learn to feed themselves, no matter how much they needed it. :D
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And if those people would rather subsist on dried beans and flour paste rather than learning, at no cost other than time, how to turn those into bean burritos, more power to them.
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They’d probably take everything, dump what couldn’t be eaten in the current form, and lobby for more gimmies.
Plus, the usual pattern goes “they don’t know how to cook/they won’t come for the classes to learn how to cook/we have to give them stuff they can already cook or that’s ready to eat.” So, short circuit it at step one– to get the food, you show you can cook it, either by passing the class or passing a practical.
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Well, the commodity value of basic foodstuffs is pretty low. Dumping it for the fraction of the price the black market would command wouldn’t garner much. My plan would also require a society hardened enough to tell people who claimed to be starving “We’ve given you plenty of food to last through the week, as well as the opportunity to learn how to cook it. How is it our fault that you cannot feed yourself? Do you need us to shovel it into your noise-holes for you? Perhaps we can pre-digest it for you like birds do?”
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We could also invoke the laws about people who can’t control themselves and pose a risk to themselves (true) or others (true — their children).
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Was informed very recently of a friend whose son was temporarily institutionalized as a homicidal risk — because the intake interviewer for a government-dependent program deliberately conflated two completely separate answers to declare him a risk to his school (and a vice principal with an apparent fetish for shuffling bright kids out of his academy setting into an “alternative program for offenders” was also involved … )
The young man involved has been variously diagnosed over the years with high-functioning Aspergers or some other autism-spectrum. From personal observation, he has had the deck stacked against him several times over and STILL come up reasonably well-socialized and “successful” in the face of adversity on most fronts. (One parent with a degenerative vision disorder that has descended into legally-blind status, the other qualifying for disability upon mental illness grounds, and older step-siblings being raised separately under a religiously-repressive set of grandparents, etc.)
He has been lucky so far. The institution he was sent to said during their intake and subsequent processing “WHY is this teenager here? Does not fit the criteria for which he was incarcerated. Not even slightly.” Yet it has still been a battle for him to be allowed to finish his school year, and a legal battle to expunge the bogus record remains to be completed.
Overabundance of caution be damned, the system that had been giving this young man a decent chance to make his own way just yanked the rug out, and all because of ONE social worker / clerk with a checklist. BAH! Any software program I have ever worked on broken this badly would have been replaced or taken out of service until repaired immediately. Will the offending case worker even be reprimanded, much less meaningfully disciplined? I — sadly, very sadly — doubt it.
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THe “system” will always be manipulated by the people who use it. Good people will interpret the rules in a way to benefit the folks they serve. Evil people will use rules as a club to inflict damage on those who offend them, though that offense be accidental or even totally imaginary.
I do tend to believe in karma. I fervently hope that such petty malicious folk eventually get what’s coming to them, but as I said in another recent post, it certainly does sometimes take it’s own sweet time to even the score.
You are correct, such human garbage rarely gets the discipline they so richly deserve, but do consider that they are permanently relegated to exist in that fetid swamp of deception, lies, and petty insults that they have created in their own minds. Such as they will always die alone and feeling cheated of the riches and glory they believe they deserved, but were always denied.
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I know a mother and 3 children who live in a welfare provided 2200 sq ft home. As far as can be told from the outside she cares for her children and takes good care of them. There is no father around because if there was all the welfare benefits would largely go away. They have a large flat screen TV in the family room and smaller flat screen TVs in each bedroom. In the garage there is a late model Cadillac Escalade. They get advance notice of when the welfare inspections will be.
Folk like this are just using the system our politicians have setup. In the worst examples there are families where for 3 or 4 generations (or more) they have been on welfare, and never a man not to mention a husband in sight.
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Some thoughts;
If the assistance to widows and orphans isn’t all channelled through the State, it won’t tend to be “one size fits none”.
I think that there are lots of studies showing that the people of the United States are generous. This undermines the position that if the State doesn’t do it, it won’t get done.
To whatever degree we constrain the choices people getting assistance have, wee are taking responsibility for their success or failure. If we give money, and don’t try to tie it down with strings, then if they are still starving, it’s their own goddamned fault. If we are constantly so far up their rears that we see out of their mouths, and they STILL are poor, then it’s our fault.
That last is why I am so leery of intrusive Child Protection Services. If somebody is horrible to their offspring, treat’s a tragedy, but if CPS destroys a family they have made ME responsible, dammit.
The State is good at brute force and bean-counting. This makes it a decent go-to to deal with delivering the mail or hammering rogue nations. The State is horrible at anything requiring judgement, subtlety, or taste. This makes it a poor choice for dealing with social issues, or funding art.
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(To the tune of We are the World because I really can carry a tune in a bucket.NOT!!!!)
Save the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me and the entire human race
There are children crying and it’s time to lend a ha-a-and to kids
The greatest gift of all…
We are the Huns
We are the Heathens
We are the one who want a better way
For freedom livin’
All the gov’s are makin’
Life harder for the ki-i-ids
They can’t
Fix the world and run it all…
*AHEM*
Sorry. Hate it when that happens. Blame my muse. Granted, it’s not her fault it’s mine, but hey… It sounded good at the time.
Anyway…
This is a subject that flat-out freaking scares me. I don’t know how we get kids taken care of without some kind of government intervention, but I’m _convinced_ that big government makes 90% or more of everything it touches worse. History backs me on this. Economies slow down when the size of government increases. The cost of a college education skyrocketed once the federal government got involved and hasn’t slown down since. As far as primary school, two words: Common Core. The School Lunch program has slid further and further down the road into idiocy since before I graduated in 1995. Michelle Obama and her dumbassery have made things worse. These are all programs that are designed to help young people and they’re all failing miserably.
On the other hand, it’s not a childs fault if their parents don’t/can’t feed them. How many eight year olds can make a living for themselves? None that I know. We can’t take it out on them if their parents suck. It’s not the child’s responsibility to make the parent work. I don’t trust the federal government to fix the problem and it’s not just for ideological reasons, by which I mean training kids to be leftists.
Big government is not only the refuge of the incompetent, it’s also built of conflicting interests and cronyism. The federal government does a good job collecting taxes and fielding a military and that’s about it. No, the road system doesn’t count. It’s falling apart and needs billions in repairs because it wasn’t built right. The Autobahn is even older and in much better condition.
So what is the solution? I’m not sure. State governments aren’t much better than the federal government and leaving things to local governments would be sure to bring accusations of racism before any laws were even passed. The political climate in this country is really that bad. I just know that the current system is broken and backward and it’s time to try something else.
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It’s no solution, but this reminded me of a story my mom was relating to me recently:
On the other hand, it’s not a childs fault if their parents don’t/can’t feed them. How many eight year olds can make a living for themselves? None that I know. We can’t take it out on them if their parents suck. It’s not the child’s responsibility to make the parent work.
My brother’s fiancee is a great example of what happens when Shit Hits the Fan HARD. She’s the first in her family to graduate from college and land a job – all financed by scholarship. The scholarship funds for books and such, she budgeted so she could help send her younger sister and brother to school. Their mother made and sold a variety of sticky rice cakes, and every weekend N would go back and help sell. My brother began accompanying her to do this. The father drove one of the smaller forms of local commute – a tricycle-cab. When N graduated, she and my brother were able to land jobs at Ernst and Young.
Then the mother died last year, and it fell to the children to figure out how to pay for the hospital expenses and the funeral costs, because their father basically fell apart. It’s been a downward spiral since then. The middle girl is in college, the youngest in high school. N struggled for a while, to make sure they could pay the rent, utilities and food, and while there was rarely any real treats, they did alright and still continued to sell their rice cakes, though it was sporadically. For a little while, the youngest came to live with my family, because he couldn’t stand how his father was acting out.
It turned out that he has a love for cooking, and that back in the day when they had a bit to spare, this went to cable tv, and he and his mother loved to watch cooking shows. His short stay with my family opened up new ideas and possibilities to him, and he went back home. I’ve heard that he’s been experimenting with creating new snack treats and confections, and he’s been selling out of the things he makes. Last weekend, he was able to make a graham cracker confection/cake that he asked the middle sister to deliver to N as a taste test/treat. While delivering it, someone wanted to buy the cake for the princely sum of 400 pesos, but the middle girl refused, since it was for Big Sis.
Neither the middle sister or the young man have graduated yet from college. In fact, he’s living alone now in that house, but he’s doing alright.
The only ‘safety net’ these folks have is themselves.
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We need to restructure the welfare system so it supports people, but definitely not in such a way as to reward having additional children. Every child needs to increase the family expenses, without increasing the money they get. A lot of the benefits should be in direct food–as in the school free breakfast and lunch programs. So the kids are actually getting fed. One of the few arguments for year round school that I agree with.
On taxes, children need to be a much larger deduction, so the “benefit” is in terms of less taxes on _earned_ money.
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Ooh, YES!
Not just because it’d benefit us, but because I get so sick of folks talking about how they’d like to have more kids, but there’s no way they could afford it, especially since if they earn even a bit more their tax load will go through the roof.
How to prevent gaming… maybe have it so that income below the poverty level for your household isn’t taxed?
I’d like to get rid of refunds that go above the amount taken out of your paycheck, though. (I would include social security, since it’s a known problem that we need more people in the future to pay into it.)
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In terms of clothes, I thought perhaps having assigned school uniform sets would work in helping that. I remember one of the things that parents back in the Philippines looked forward to was if a uniform was used. It was cheaper in the long run because then they didn’t have to keep up with fashionability. When the school years were done, those clothes often became secondary wear.
And I agree so much on the taxes part of your comment.
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There is no reason for the parents to keep up with fashion for their kids in the first place. As long as the kids are properly clothed that is suffiecent. If the family is struggling for money, and the kid wants to be fashionable, they can go out and earn their own money and buy their own ‘fashionable’ clothes. It will teach them responsibility and they will likely take much better care of the clothes they sweated to earn than any clothes their parents bought for them, regardless of how fashionable they are.
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Oh, I agree. I wasn’t a fashionable kid and I didn’t mind at all. By the time I started wanting to dress up I was in college, and I was into Elegant Gothic Lolita, and my mom delighted in buying me things, because she liked seeing me wear them. I didn’t ask her; it was more along the line of her coming home and saying with delight “Look at this blouse/skirt/crocheted pretty that I found for CHEAP because nobody else was getting it!”
My daughter went through a similar phase of EGL and inherited those clothes. I’m keeping them around in case I have another girl.
*grin*
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I think i saw that outfit Thursday.
(and that is about all i am gonna say on that topic, because i dun wanna get sent to teh corner)
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Cool show, but I’m not making a connection somewhere. I didn’t see any outfit I could make out except the guys in t-shirts and jeans…
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Probably a half dozen ‘Elegant Gothic Lolitas’ (there would be more at a Cruxshadows show) and various other Goth segment outfits. And both holding my phone up for sixteen minutes was a pain.
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err, ‘boy’ not ‘both’
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Couldn’t really get a good view of the crowd, what with being backlit from the stage. I’ll happily take your word on the EGLs being there, of course. On the other hand, the audio quality was surprisingly good, and you’ve now introduced me to another group I think I’ll like. Thanks!
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processed the heck out of the audio to get it there. the kick drum is still distorted, but i filtered some of it off and tried to bring back a little dynamic range.
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Like this?
Not the futuristic barbarian chicks in glittery loincloths. Somehow I don’t think that is what Shadowdancer’s mom was buying for her. ;)
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No, i mean the chicks in the audience with fairy or angel wings.
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Very cool show; you saw it? Awesome~!
When I got older I moved to Elegant Gothic Aristocrat – put little gothic touches to my office clothes and such. Was fun. These days, I tend to wear sun dresses.
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yes I’m the person holding his phone up to film that (and the three other songs i recorded)
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And from time to time if the mother was not yet abandoned that too could be arranged.
Bone chilling is no exaggeration.
There was once a group home for the disabled in Moscow Idaho that was in fact supported by the community – but just as the free care (if needed the County Commission would waive the charges and for community members the needs could be pretty clear) at the county hospital system broke down with care beyond the county hospital. With helicopter flights to Salt Lake or Spokane leaving a county of say 10,000 people looking at a multimillion dollar charge for say a premature infant born to a migrant agricultural worker – so too rising costs associated with maybe better if less caring care led to the sale of group home project to a for-profit enterprise that relied on insurance coverage or disability benefits for the residents to show a profit. That’s one reason residential addiction treatment is often short term – that’s the coverage limit not the treatment limit.
Used to know a case worker in Chicago who wouldn’t make home visits but did ask mothers to drag all their children through the transit system to visit her office. The principal use of the office was to sell cheap cigarettes run up from the Carolinas – today maybe opiates?
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http://www.catholicleague.org/myths-of-the-magdalene-laundries/
There were abuses, especially from our perspective– but it’s worth noting that women chose the Magdalene laundries over the workhouses, and that the entire system was an example of a system that had sucked folks down.
*******
For the cigarettes– I don’t know if the record still holds, but as of a couple of years ago the most high street value drug bust in Washington State history was of smuggled cigarettes.
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Not a terribly large percentage of those who entered chose the laundries over the workhouses given the percentage who entered voluntarily. To say the laundries were better than the workhouses is indeed to damn with faint praise. This state report used by the Catholic League op.cit. supra begins with the formation of the Irish state and I’m sure circumstances varied greatly in different times and places.
Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee
to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries
AN ROINN DLÍ AGUS CIRT AGUS COMHIONANNAIS
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE AND EQUALITY
There is an argument that the Catholic League protests too much:
Reminds me of:
Oh hard is the fortune of all womankind
They’re always controlled, they’re always confined
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I think you’re missing the point that they weren’t special horrors of the time, they were the foster care/women only workhouses with the same issues that workhouses had, but designed for women.
That’s a far cry from the utterly horrifying popular culture archetype, such as mentioned in the song– where someone who is “too pretty” for the town gets shipped off to a life of slavery.
After growing up with the school treating Sinclare’s The Jungle as a documentary (seriously, I didn’t know it was a novel for years– everything was second hand, although it was pointed to pretty often) I can’t understate the issues with conflating makes a really high impact story vs fact.
I chose the Catholic League’s page because they give the names of the gov’t reports, large quotes and the names of those they cite, without having to make multiple quotes, and actually offered important information such as the abuse that started the whole thing included emotional neglect.
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I’m of that “not sanguine about terminating parent’s rights” sort, tied up with not wanting to see childcare further bureaucratized.
Our current system is broken, badly, and abused, repeatedly. By both sides of the system and frequently for petty reasons. Humans. And it has to be dealt with, sooner rather than later. But so many of the solutions proposed (and those my cynical side considers) frighten me.
Most, no doubt, have heard the horror stories of children thrown into the system. The incentives are skewed and the system discourages attachments between fosters and their charges. But the bigger, creeping nightmare I see is the bureaucratic inertia that widgetizes children and moves them about like inconvenient and ill-made parts in a massive machine with no purpose. This bureaucracy takes those horror stories and institutionalizes them. Then, oddly for all its bureaucratic rigidity, this system is so easily susceptible to input from the latest harebrained sociological theory applied without due consideration as an ongoing rolling experiment with un-monitored variables and no controls. For the lucky, it spits adults out the other end who go on to find ways to live in society. How many are unlucky?
As our host notes, I suspect the solution lies in breaking the system down to the smallest, most local level possible. And, for me personally, privatizing big chunks. I undoubtedly have a romanticized view of orphanages, and clearly the incentives and motivations need careful consideration. But I have a hard time imagining, say, a Catholic orphanage with integral education being worse than the mess of foster care in many places. The vested interest in turning out mature, capable individuals trumps many other concerns.
As a tail-end consideration, I’m not bashing foster care, per se. I know there are foster families who are in it for the kids and make huge sacrifices to do everything they can. And I know the system breaks a lot of those families. The incentives and the bureaucracy…
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“But the bigger, creeping nightmare I see is the bureaucratic inertia that widgetizes children and moves them about like inconvenient and ill-made parts in a massive machine with no purpose. “
Many running the system and the gov’t see this as a feature, not a bug.
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Yep. Part of the perverse incentives of the system. And an essential element to be removed.
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If the solution to your problem is not obvious, then you have failed to adequately define your problem (the Chesterson problem quoted upthread suffers from an ambiguous solution because there is confusion about whether the problem is a drunk vicar or a locked-in vicar. Once the problem is correctly identified – a drunk vicar – the solution is readily apparent – get another vicar.). That isn’t to say the solution is necessarily easy – or even acheivable, but you at least know in which direction to go.
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To continue the thought from before I was so rudely interrupted by work (stupid supervisors. They think they can tell you what to do and when to do it just because they’re giving you money.)
I think the key to properly identifying the problem is the repeated refrain, even here, of “the system.” If I may quote from the nuclear catechism (at least in the US):
The goal of every bureaucrat is to become part of “the system.” Because when that happens everything wrong can be blamed on the inanimate, incorporeal, system and nothing is ever anyone’s fault. I think the key to the solution is to make a singular individual responsible for the welfare of children. A named individual who is to blame whenever a foster child is mistreated, a child is removed from a loving home, or a child dies due to neglect or mistreatment by their guardians. That cannot happen at a national level.
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Off topic, but how would you like to grow up with the given name of Hymen?
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It might partly explain his, ahem, warm, outgoing, laid-back, and sociable nature.
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It was Hyman (from German Heimann), a common “outside” substitute for the Jewish first name Chaim (“life”).
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Well, it is worse than that, vicars aren’t supposed to get drunk, it is a scandal, and the worst part comes from trying not to humiliate someone everyone has so much at stake to remain unsullied.
Sometimes the understanding of the problem also makes you shy away from the solution too, if everyone has a stake in not addressing the problem.
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That’s probably why the people who are generally adept at solving problems are also usually social outcasts.
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That’s a first-order approximation.
Second-order approximation: The people who think they are generally adept at solving problems are often social outcasts, because they are not actually adept at solving problems. In fact, it is their very social ineptitude that makes them oblivious to the actual problem, and also makes them believe that ‘solving’ the trivial difficulty that they identify as the problem ought to satisfy everyone.
See also: Dunning-Kruger Effect.
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And the arguments between various folks who are sure they’re good at solving problems, but don’t agree on what the problem is, will be epic.
Besides a wide range of “wrong problem,” you’ve also got a slightly smaller but still varied range of “wrong answer”– which each side attacking anyone who doesn’t agree on both the problem and the answer, and sometimes on the reason why it’s the answer.
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Simplest form of the Problem Of The World-
problems are seldom polite enough to line up and attack you one at a time, they tend to gang up, mutate and form globs where a solution to one makes the problem of the other even worse, so you’ve got to find the least bad solution.
A lot of people claim they’re good at solving problems are just good at over simplifying things and ignoring complications they don’t want to address. *thinking about Navy years*
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H. L. Mencken
I’ve known military types making decisions under uncertainty with some urgency. Most, maybe all, comfort themselves with a belief that good enough is good enough it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Sadly there are times and places where it does have to be about perfect including perfectly implemented – often in those cases, as Dr. Pournelle repeats frequently, analysis is not paralysis but the wisest course.
I’m not sure how to reconcile the tension there.
As somebody said it’s hard to make decisions under stress so it pays to think ahead and for something like child protection and fostering about all I can do is pick which side I want to err on. Better in principal to leave children with their family of origin rather than to have a principal of rush to foster. Be different if fostering worked better. Sometimes all I can do to pick which side I’ll err on.
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I spent a number of years living in “pubic housing.” There is a “rule” that says residents “get help in starting businesses.” Hah. The way it worked was that the “managers” did everything they could to make it impossible. There was no point in complaining, because they were all political appointees.
I reported drug dealing evidence to the PD, and the “manager” said. “Nope. No way any of that is happening here.” All the residents knew better, but we couldn’t stop it.
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Well, they were helping the drug dealers start their business, you were just trying to go too legit for your business.
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I’m about as strong a libertarian as you will meet. However, I believe that children have as much right to be free of injury (physical and psychological) as adults. Children’s rights should be greater than the rights of parents. That’s why I support parenting licenses. I support parenting licenses now, where they’re one of ten thousand licenses and certifications. In my never-to-be-realized libertarian society, parenting licenses would be the only licenses.
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And who do you trust with the power to issue the license that allows, or denies, people the right to have children?
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No libertarian would ever get a parenting license right now. Sorry. No way. My MIL worked for social services for some years at the periphery and I tried not to listen to her talk. In their parlance, libertarians and people who mistrust the government are as dangerous as cultists. So — NO.
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This was a point I would bring up in my Criminal Justice classes (mumble mumble) years ago. They class would wish for an effective form of stopping criminal behavior. I would mention that this would require a good mind-control program – – and do you really trust the government with that. The usual response was a lot of silence.
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“The only thing we can do is not be idiots.”
Oh, if only everyone would just stop being idiots. But I’m afraid that, like True Communism that works, True Libertarianism (ala Mad Mike’s Freehold before the UN worked to mess it up), it is something we are doomed to never ever see.
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This is the crux which brings into doubt the phrase “as strong a libertarian as you will meet.”
Sorry, I don’t wish to be harshly skeptical, but perhaps an examination of principles is in order. Or a more thorough consideration of all the ways that could go wrong.
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Forsaken nesting fail!!
Cued under Frank at 9:29 pm on 4 April if it’s to make any sense at all.
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Sarah,
Why is it we only focus on “Charity” as the way to lift the poor out of poverty.
What does charity teach the poor, that if you look, act, are pitiful people will give you stuff.
Why not micro-loans or a variant? That this money is a loan that is expected and are obligated to be payed back.
A good book on this is “Banker to the Poor” by Muhammad Yunus.
Hmmm….
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Oh, I’m all for micro-loans, etc — but there has to be will now and right now our own domestic poor are broken more ways than one, and just loaning them money will do nothing.
I agree with you that that’s a better way, but it won’t work for most adults (no, sadly I do mean most) and it won’t work for CHILDREN at all…
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Hoyt unless you take the child out of the home the only way to reach and effect a childs life is through the parents.
A good portion of US “poor” are not broken they’re playing the system. They are like children in that children always test theeir boundaries; what can they get away with and what can they not.
To me an adult is anyone that has learned the skill of self-desipline. To set their own boundaries regardless of age.
What we have is children being raised by older children looking for the government to be the adult, but the ironic thing is the Government is full of these grownup children too.
Sarah if you haven’t read “Banker to the Poor” he addresses your consern, that just as young children thrive when their are clear set boundreries, that grown-up to will thrive if you treat them like adults and quit giving into to bad temoer tantrums.
If we want to fix this we those of us that have learned the skill of Self-reliance and Self-desipline, need to quit enabling their bad behaviour. This sounds condescending and it is not. As Ben Franklin said (paraphrasing) quit making the poor comfortable.
And if you do reach the PARENTS you will you will reach CHILDREN, because just turning them over to the GROWNUP CHILDREN incharge of the STATE isn’t going to teach the young self-relience and disipline. How could it? Do ypu think the State even know these things themselves?
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Charity should be 1) emergency assistance, 2) help for those who cannot help themselves [small children, the retarded and insane, and similar], 3) people who only need simple medical assistance and have no means to obtain it [Project ORIBS and their cataract surgeries, club foot and cleft palate repairs]. After that, in a perfect world, assistance would be micro-loans or teaching people how to use what they have more efficiently [Heifer Project, some of the Mennonite and similar vocational programs]. Assuming that you can work past cultural practices that hold people back, and kleptocratic “governments,” and the lack of the rule-of-law.
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TXRed,
1) Can you define for me what constitutes an emergsncy?
2) “…those who can not help themselves…” Ambiguous and in regards to your first two examples unclear as to what you think constitutes. What they lack is knowledge, skills and abilities along with the time to learn them. So if parents are not providing this, do we just throw money at the parents, or is their an other solution? Sorry, TXRed, you haven’t defined a solution but a problem to be solved.
3) Seems to be more of access problem. Not a compassion problem. And why could this not also be handled at the Micro-loan leave. Why not require the parents or those in need to contribute something (ti be determined indevidualy)? Why must it be given free of charge. I’m all for doing nice things for people. As long it doesn’t harm them in the long run by teaching them bad habit of reling on others.
Before we assume people can’t or are unable we might want to test if that actually is true for them by chalenging them to see what they are caplable of.
We might be plasently surprised.
;-)
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Correction:
2) “…those who can not help themselves…” Ambiguous and in regards to your first two examples unclear as to what you think constitutes [helplessness].
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Correction on my correction:
2) “…those who can not help themselves…” Ambiguous and in regards to your first two examples unclear as to what you think constitutes [charity and what it is to be].
The examples of what charity is follows how to actually help vs just make ourselves feel better.
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