Becoming more Blessed

Several years ago, I was invited to write an article for the HelpingHelp Innovation for Nonprofits blog. I chose to discuss the negative connections between poverty and charity, one of the many issues that inspired the essays collected in my book, The World I Imagine: A creative manual for ending poverty and building peace.


Conservatives are trying harder than ever before to eliminate government programs that help poor people. They claim it would be more acceptable if those services were managed by charities. That’s the reason I must explain one more time why both government and charities must take more effective approaches to the problem of poverty in our society. Here, then, is my article which was originally posted on March 17, 2010:


BECOMING MORE BLESSED

Most people know the quote from the Bible. It would be a "red letter" statement attributed to Jesus, except it’s in the book of Acts, chapter 20, verse 35: " . . . remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive." (KJV)

You could say there’s an entire industry built around the concept of people being "more blessed." It’s called "charity," which is a synonym for "love." That’s good, of course, but what about the recipients? Are those who receive less "blessed" than those who give to others?

In a perfect world, people who receive would be able to return the favor, if not directly to those who give to them, at least to someone else in turn. Thus, society would be in balance. But that’s not how things are in the real world.

In fact, society almost guarantees an entire class of people are doomed to be among the less blessed. Billions of people spend their lives wanting for the basic goods and services we "blessed" people take for granted: nourishing food, clean water, safe and sheltering homes, and much more.

Does it have to be like that? Can something be done about it? If so, what?

Consider what happens in the event of an extraordinary catastrophe, such as a hurricane or an earthquake. The authorities declare an emergency, and public and private organizations are mobilized. This process allows millions of people to pitch in and help victims of the disaster.

In such cases, there are givers and receivers. But the situation, though dire, is usually temporary. The goal is to bring life back to normal for the receivers, so they can once again become givers in their turn. That’s how the social balance is maintained.

But what of the ultimate emergency: poverty? To those in the lowest economic strata, life is an eternal emergency. They are in constant need of help, not merely to make it through a day or a defined period of time, but for their entire lives. They are chronic receivers, the incurably less blessed.

My essays in The World I Imagine

detail a comprehensive plan for

ending poverty and war by

building a society in which

everyone enjoys some measure

of prosperity and peace.

Fortunately, many organizations help the more blessed give to those in need. They provide food, medical services, water, shelter--the basics. But as much as they help people survive, such bequests rarely offer long-term improvement for the people they help. Poverty is a virtual inferno that destroys everything in its path. For all their good intentions, these givers are like firefighters trying to stop a massive wildfire with small buckets of water.

The solution to this endless catastrophe must be to build a system that is, if not fireproof, at least fire-resistant. In the face of poverty, we must become proactive instead of merely reactive. There is an old saying: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." This is wise counsel.

But what if we sit with the man at the riverbank until he is adept at snagging the biggest fish, then declare him ready, stand up, take back our fishing poles, tackle, bait, all the tools he needs to catch more fish to feed his family and more--and carry these tools away with us? What good does that new education do for the man and his family then?

Education is only the first step. After that, people need jobs and tools so they can perform honest labor and earn enough to purchase the basic goods and services. Then they will be able to enjoy a dignified existence.
Charitable organizations work best when they offer this kind of parity between giving and receiving. Besides providing the basic goods and services, they can teach and provide recipients with the means to work and earn money. One of the best organizations of this kind is Heifer International.


Instead of simply feeding hungry people, the charity provides an animal, usually a cow or a goat, to a family that will breed it and return several animals as repayment for the loan. Then those animals are given to other families, and the blessings are spread far and wide. In the end, recipients end up with small herds that not only feed their own families but help bring prosperity to their villages.

Microloans are another tool that help poor people, especially women, raise themselves, their families, and their villages out of poverty. With a small amount of money, they learn to build successful businesses while they repay the loans at a small rate of interest.

Givers to these types of charities are helping to raise the status of the less blessed so that poor people can eventually become givers themselves. This is the best kind of giving. This is truly the way for each of us to become more blessed.

　
The World I Imagine: A creative manual for ending poverty and building peace and my historical mystery novel, Lion’s Pride, are available through your local bookstore. They are featured at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and most online bookstores around the world. Both are available for Kindle readers.

Old vs. New Energy: Why the old arguments are just as dirty as fossil fuels

For the life of me, I cannot understand why so many people continue to argue against investing in green energy, especially when all the fossil-fuel apologists keep repeating the same old tiresome arguments. For instance, there’s the idea that green energy is a job killer. Give me a break!

JOB GENERATOR

It takes work to build and install solar panels, windmills, and the many other types of non-polluting equipment used to generate and deliver all that glorious power just waiting to be gleaned from the renewable resources and natural forces of our planet. Then there are all the people who will be needed to run and maintain green energy-generating equipment. Just what do the hordes of old-energy protagonists call those jobs? Chopped liver?

Green energy won’t kill any more jobs than fossil-fuel energy does. In fact, just as old energy powered so many new industries during the 20th-century, clean energy from wind, sunlight, steam, etc., will spur even more industries that are yet to be born, or even conceived, well into the future.

JOB KILLER

Actually, I confess that there are some jobs green energy will kill. As we switch from old energy to clean green energy over the years, there’s bound to be a diminishing need for the high cost of cleaning up the environment from all the damage now being done by filthy fossil fuels. This means our society will enjoy gradually lower rates of the vast range of physical ills now being triggered and aggravated by that same pollution. We’ll experience dwindling costs for treating asthma, heart disease, various types of cancer, and much, much more. Then there are all the lives that will be saved because fewer people will work in fossil-fuel industries who now die much too early, from job-induced illnesses and the more immediate dangers of explosions and mine cave-ins.

ATOMIC ENERGY

And all the arguments against fossil fuels go double for the most dangerous energy industry of all. Atomic power plants are more expensive to build than all the others, and there are more things that can go wrong with them. Most important of all is the fact that a single accident can destroy the viability of an entire region in mere hours, after the resulting poison in the atmosphere kills or sickens untold numbers of people. Why anyone would want to continue to use such a dangerous resource is beyond me. It’s about time our society stopped playing with the most volatile elements on the planet for nothing more than filthy lucre and turn to the least dangerous--and eventually, the least costly--of all the resources available for the benefit of mankind.

PRODUCTION COSTS

But what about the cost of investing in the development, production, and installation of equipment to capture and deliver power from wind, sunlight, and more, energy that’s now going to waste? Well, just how much money did it take to develop, build, and install all the power generation and delivery systems that depend on fossil fuels that will run out in the foreseeable future? Just what do old-energy propagandists think our industries and vehicles are supposed to do for go-juice once those fossil fuels do run out?

Oh, yes, they predict that oil and gas are going to last another century, and we’ll enjoy the benefits of coal (which they claim is ‘clean’ now, but more about that below) for at least another couple of centuries. But what happens after that? And what about the fact that long before these filthy resources completely run out, our society will experience more inconveniences and higher prices for the fossil fuels they now worship with such reverence? The fact is, there’s going to be a growing scarcity of those resources, and few but the wealthiest among us will actually be able to afford them anyway. If we haven’t already developed the requisite clean-energy replacements for all that dirty oil and coal by the time they do run out, all the modern conveniences we now take for granted will be totally useless.

‘CLEAN’(?) COAL

Lately, the coal industry has been paying a ton of cash to advertise that not only is coal going to last longer than any other fossil fuel, it’s also much cleaner than it used to be. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, their lobbyists are spending more wads of the industry’s profits to convince politicians that it would cost them too much to install and run the equipment needed to actually clean up their product,. They want the government to abolish regulations that require the clean-energy treatments they tout in their spurious ads. The truth is, they intend to keep on polluting the environment the way they always have. Coal-industry advocates don’t want anyone to put two and two together and realize how much they’re contradicting themselves. Owners and executives of coal companies simply do not want to be responsible members of society. It’s long past time we made sure they do nothing less than the right thing for a change.

ENERGY RATES

Then there’s the last--and lately, the most popular--argument that switching from dirty old fossil fuels to clean green energy is going to make electricity rates go up. This is the least valid argument of all. The current low rates of old-energy electricity and vehicle fuels are a direct result of the many tax manipulations that benefit fossil-fuel corporations and allow them to provide their products at lower rates while continuing to reap obscene profits. Similar tax support would allow the development and installation of green energy facilities. Even better, in the long run, the lower costs of running and maintaining these new, 21st-century industries would actually result in much lower rates than we now pay for fossil fuel products--even without tax advantages.

BUILD FOR THE FUTURE NOW

We must focus as much of our resources as we can toward developing clean energy right now, without delay. In fact, it would make perfect sense for all the old-fuel industries to start investing their ungodly profits in that effort. That way they’ll be even richer in the far-flung future than they are today. Otherwise, we, and the traditional energy sector, are headed for even worse economic disaster than anything experienced before. Not only must we make every effort to support the development of green energy industries, we must also do everything in our power to stop the perpetuation of the filthy, polluting old-energy industries that are now enjoying too much advantage in our economy and society.

That’s why I’ve posted the following video, in which Robert Redford explains why we must stop the oil industry from building the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline straight through the heart of our country:

 

 

Take action:

 

nrdc.org/energy/dirtyfuels_tar.asp



 

Moving forward: From the Three R’s to the Four RE’s

In these troubled times, the Republican mantra is that we must make sacrifices. Shared sacrifice, they call it. Except they expect the sharing to begin at the bottom and move up just far enough to envelop all those who’ve sacrificed for the past 30 years, whenever right-wingers have been in charge.

Heaven forfend anyone in the upper economic classes would ever have to cut back on luxuries. In fact, the GOP policy is to take whatever is saved by cutting benefits and services to the poor and middle classes and reward their rich cronies with lower taxes and higher corporate salaries and profits.

Meanwhile, the economy is in the toilet and no one seems to know the way out. Worse, by cutting educational funding, among other services, the GOP is not only hurting society now but stunting future economic growth.

Danger signs have been obvious for years, even when Republicans claimed things were great. While they worked well for politicians and their rich buddies, policies that also seemed to benefit folks closer to the bottom contained hidden booby traps.
For instance, when the Bush administration claimed they’d led the nation into the greatest era of home ownership in history, banks were giving lower-income people complicated loans deliberately designed to collapse later on. At the same time, corporate leaders plotted to lay off hundreds of thousands of those new home owners and reward themselves for their crimes.

When the multitude of foreclosures struck, the ensuing costs of unemployment and poverty quickly destroyed the consumer market that their much-touted capitalist economy needs to function. Their greedy plot to grab as much gold as they could as quickly as possible was destined to destroy the economy, first in this country and finally throughout the world.

That’s just the tip of the problem, and it’ll continue as long as Republicans stubbornly impede change. Still, the solution is simple. The journey from this point to prosperity could be short. We just have to agree on the goals, plan the steps, and get to work. Consider this blueprint:

RE-TEACH: Education is the basic building block of a successful society, but too many young people are poorly trained in reading, math, science, and the entire range of skills necessary for 21st century jobs. Besides streamlining primary and secondary educational methods, we must establish a comprehensive public-private system to train people of all ages for today’s jobs.

RE-SOURCES: Plenty of jobs are waiting to be done, from rebuilding aging infrastructure to providing services to people and communities everywhere. All that’s missing is the resources to make it happen. Step One, above, would provide well-trained workers; governments from the local to federal levels, must plan and organize projects; and businesses, from small companies to multibillion-dollar corporations, should sign up to lead projects, even investing resources when and where they can realize eventual returns. Rather than treating this plan as a short-term stimulus, it should be viewed as a firm policy for the long term.

RE-TURN: This is the most controversial step, but if done correctly, it’ll be temporary. Taxes on high-income earners must return to 1990s levels to provide seed money to implement the plan. As I explain in Step Four, below, success would mean these funds would eventually be replaced by revenue from a newly active work force.

RE-WARD: The payoff is win-win-win for workers, governments, and companies. Well-trained, fully employed workers return wages in the form of taxes and payments for goods and services needed to enjoy a dignified lifestyle; tax revenues allow governments to provide necessary services; and sales ensure that companies thrive. This is truly vibrant capitalism--the direct opposite of the reward-the-rich-at-the-expense-of-the-lower-classes system that Republicans have touted for three decades.
This idea isn’t new. Even as the Bush administration claimed things were fine, I began writing articles explaining the plan in detail. I compiled 47 of those essays into The World I Imagine: A creative manual for ending poverty and building peace. The book can be purchased from online bookstores, including Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, as an e-book from Outskirts Press, and downloaded to Kindle.

As bad as things seem, planning and implementing simple positive steps could turn the economy completely around. All it would take is the political will to organize governments, companies, and citizens into a work force for the future, a future in which prosperity and peace are the norm, rather than the exception.