Randomly (un)charitable.

Talking about the RNLI, street people, homelessness, food banks and charities.

Today was a bad day for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution because iv’e decided to change my will and not leave them a single penny that would go immediately into the pockets of any one of their board of management and especially not their ‘chief executive’ who takes home a cool £160.000 per annum while the normal situation for the actual crews is a big fat zero.

Instead of going to a highly overpaid chief executive or any one of his corporate board of directors…the director of ‘business intelligence’ for example (what the actual fluck is one of those ?) it is instead going to stay ‘in the family’ , in a way….I don’t have any direct family now although my partner does so it’s going there one day.

So…this post is about charity,charities and charitable organizations but to explain it (charity) I have to go back beyond my recent brush with the Roman Catholic church via last winter’s RCIA course and delve into something that Dr Jordan Peterson said some several years back. At the time I thought that he’d given an unnecessarily snarky answer to a direct question but we now know that he wasn’t well at the time and so let it pass. The question he was asked was ‘Do you believe in God” ?….and his strange, I thought, answer at that time was something like “it depends on what you mean by God and what you mean by believe”…..that’s as close as I remember it.

Given that a few short years later I started to do the RC Rcia course I had to take on the question of what or who we mean by God and then what we mean or act out as belief : neither are that straightforward when you dip below the surface although it’s mighty strange that we all seem to say God without a clear idea or definition of exactly what we are talking about and then the even more basic term of believe or believe throws up some very strange questions. The simplest dismissal of the term or idea of God is to quickly do away with the naive view of a God who is a personal God, the supreme being perhaps and maybe thought of as a high level internet game wizard who can do anything….in a way this is the personal God espoused by many of the more right wing shouty and happy-clappy of the American churches.

Islam, I think, gets it closer when, for example they seem strict about not making any images of God while even the Roman Catholic churches are often packed to the gills with high level art which includes God as some white haired old bloke directing affairs …..bit like Gandalf the white perhaps !. For obvious reasons I have to leave a defintion of God aside for now the nearest I seem to get is to say a few things about what God isn’t…..and even then I may well be wrong ; for this post though the more interesting question is about belief – is it say a purely cerebral thing or does belief also require personal change that results in action or works perhaps.

So anyway……lent.

This winter of course I was exposed to the teaching & preparation cycle for potential ‘prospects’ of the RC church – it’s ok though – I didn’t have to wear a prospects patch while waiting for the full 3 part rocker….that was a joke by the way. On a more serious note the season of Lent happened during which the expectation and teaching is that Christians would normally fast, give alms (charity) and perform some kind of self examination. I did think of a very bad nurses joke about self examination but I think I should leave that for later so…….. If asked what I was giving up for Lent I might have said ‘crack cocaine and whores’…..sorry – my bad sense of humor strikes once more.

In proper seriousness though Lent is one of the times when belief is meant to result in action and that action is along the lines of what Christ himself said to do thus : heal the sick, give alms to the poor and comfort those low in spirit so I thought about that quite a lot because there are also quite a few warnings and strictures about things not to do – not making actions showy and pretentious in a ‘look at me’ kind of way. Thus the warning about praying in public might now be moved on a bit to taking a selfie while giving a street person food or money and posting it on instagram.

I completely understand, I think, the main Christian principle being expressed here – that living our lives isn’t or shouldn’t be just about ourselves but that faith and belief require thought and action towards others less fortunate than ourselves ; in short that if I were to profess belief then I should also demonstrate action…..although not perhaps being seen to act in a ‘look at me’ kind of way. We know that many or most people don’t identify or practice as Christians but instead have a generally woolly sense of goodness and spirituality and many still act in a way that is charitable – many thus give to actual charities or say give food or money to street people. Iv’e heard it said that giving a ‘street person’ money or food does induce a feeling of ‘charitable act’ in the person giving – after all it’s either food or money given to someone who really appears to need it.

The problem, according to people who know far more about street people than I do is that most are there to support a drug habit and either giving them food or money directly supports their habit and keeps them on the street while also giving the giver a brief Dopamine hit of satisfaction…..the do-gooder gets his kicks as well !. This, by the way is the view of those who are more directly involved with homelessness and long term drug users.

I find myself caught between a Christian charitable view and a deeply cynical one because I know I always had a cynical view about the larger charities – the well known ones that is. Now, if there’s something you feel very to be very personal and choose to give to a particular charity then that’s your choice ; mine would have been the RNLI because of my long term connection with the sea but that I feel has now changed. I’m not sure when the change happened but the RNLI seemed to change maybe ten to twenty years ago and went from the actual charity that it was to the self advertising almost corporate management driven organization that it is today. Today if you pop some money in a RNLI volunteer’s tin then you need to be sure that you’re happy with the idea of a lot of it going to a team of management executives who’s chief executive was reported as taking a salary of £160.000 per annum and who leads a management team who take salaries frequently above £60.000 per annum. The expression ‘like pigs in the trough‘ comes to mind.

If you say support one of the major charities then it might not be such a great idea to go see just how much the various executives and board of directors award themselves while pulling hard on the guilt strings of the liberal do-good classes.

Here goes…..and this is a direct quote “Charities are required to state in their accounts the number of employees who have been paid more than £60,000 a year. The mean number of people earning more than £60,000 a year among the top 100 charities this year was 84, up from 68 in Third Sector’s 2019 salary study.

The British Council came out as the charity employing the highest number of people in this bracket with 627, up from 511 in 2017. Save the Children International remained in second place in this list, with 439 employees earning more than $75,000 as per its latest accounts, which are all in US dollars.

And “The Church Commissioners for England moved up from 22nd on the list in 2019 to fourth in the latest study after its highest paid member of staff, its director of investments, received a long-term incentive plan payment of £227,700 as part of a £523,000 salary package. The charity confirmed the individual was still in post but refused to disclose their name.

Anyway and to move on…..

I fully understand why i’m temperamentally cynical when it comes to large organizations, large ‘free’ incomes, large pots of money and basically disagreeable management types with their snouts in the corporate charity trough. What I want to move on to and talk about is charity at a more local and immediate level and draw on something that at least one of the recent pontiffs talked about in the principle of subsidiarity – basically about acting small and local rather than relying on the ‘charity’ of the bog state.

I guess that every normal person around here may have noticed that their everyday shopping bill has suddenly got a lot larger – when we looked at our food receipts we saw huge increases in even basic foodstuffs – way higher than the claimed rate of inflation. The reality seems to be that some people are struggling right now with food bills and if we get even a moderately hard winter then some people are going to have to make the tough decision as to whether to eat or heat their homes…..the survival answer is to eat BTW.

One feature that we know of and have some recent experience of is the use of food banks and community based meal schemes…..not directly, as yet, because we have 2 NHS pensions which although they are slowly dropping behind inflation do still pay the bills – as and when it gets really bad I will go back into full time survival gardening. We know of at least one young couple (in their 30s) who basically feed themselves and one school age child mostly from several local food banks.

The situation is that we live in a small rural village in between 2 small towns, both of which have supermarkets and both of which have food banks as a feature. The couple we know of are in their 30’s, don’t work and in fact have never worked – we regularly see them out and about – fully fit and seemingly active and yet they claim benefits, use the local food banks to the maximum and we know take regular holidays. I’m not sure what the situation is with both of them not working but it’s rumoured that one claims to be the other’s carer and therefore not able to work ; I don’t know the truth of that but I do know that they marched up the hill past our place this week toting a large holdall full of ‘free’ food having been around the supermarkets for their weekly ‘shop’ – that’s not a joke as we know people who know them well.

I feel that I need to quip “we have a problem Huston” because while I can justify, I think, a measure of cynicism towards the big box charities and their bloated management structures I think I have a more personal and visceral problem with the behaviour of people like that local couple. I find that I begin to sound like just another angry conservative old person moaning about benefits layabouts and ‘wasters’. We live in a relatively poor area that has high unemployment – I know a bit about the local jobs market because I tried to find a part time job last winter and failed, I also know many local people who struggle by inside the ‘trap’ of low pay jobs set against reduced benefits and many of those live stressed and frugal lives…..not so with the ‘takers’ who seem to play every trick in the benefits play-book.

Back to this years lent experience then it would seem that belief in action required at least three principle actions these being ; fasting, the giving of alms (charity) and self examination – in the RC sense that would then lead on to confession – I also used to joke about confession with a priest in terms of “how long have you got” !. But seriously though fasting is a very good idea for health and longevity and when I do it I find that my mental clarity improves. The giving of alms creates the kind of problems that iv’e been talking about so far and the practice of self examination shows me that the local situation of ‘takers’ just makes me uncharitably angry.

I began to wonder if the principle of Biblical ‘charity’ holds up as well today in the west, while the idea of alms giving seemed to be consistent with relieving genuine extreme poverty we now deal with that on a big state basis so I could argue that a lot of my enforced taxation over an entire working life has gone towards the social budget and a vast amount of that is wasted therefore why should I or would I feel the need to add another drop to the bottomless bucket ?. I don’t think any of the Biblical principles deal well either with the big box charities as it seems that average Joe gives while management executive Joe takes far more.

Instead of money, the value of which I think is debased by the state and taxation I wonder if the more appropriate and personal approach to charity would be to not give small amounts of useless cash but instead to give our time and attention which are infinitely more valuable resources. To bring that down to nuts and bolts I wondered what action I could take locally that would make some situation, any situation, better. If the ‘average’ village behaviour is chronic littering and chronic dog fouling coupled with pavement blocking parking of high end cars then maybe that’s my time should go. I thought about that for a while and went on a mental dive down through what the worst hidden problems are and one of those I would say is the largely forgotten prison population just out on the moor….literally Dartmoor prison and what I know is a high population of men who can’t read, write or build boats for example and where I read well, write ok on a good day and am becoming useful with my hands.

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Well that’s it for this Sunday’s written meditation about the non meaning of life once more. Iv’e ended up thinking myself into a corner so today I just stopped and in a very Petersonian way ‘cleaned my room’ because the house dust and pollen was really getting to me.

Best wishes y’awl.