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Charities / Charities: Help for those in need or the redemption we need?
« on: May 10, 2011, 09:59:42 PM »
Hello everybody! I would like to devote this first post to a quite sensitive matter concerning charities. This is whether charities actually help people or not.
The first part of the answer to this question has to do with the intentions of people who participate in charities. It is for sure that many people care for humanity and try to heal some of its wounds, believing that charities can serve this purpose. Thus, they raise funds or they are even active organizers of campaigns, in order to help those in need. On the other hand we have rich people, millionaires or even billionaires, religious or not organizations and governments as well, that donate great amounts of money to charities. Some of them, although I am personally not aware of one, should be doing this due to their good will. But, most of them do not. It is hard to believe, for example, that those who become rich, such as many businessmen, due to their exploiting of workers and others, care about people in need. This is easily proved by some examples of charities: Many businessmen donate to educational foundations in order to make research for their own business and profit, such as Bill Gates, many governments send humanitarian ambassadors to countries in order to have a control in local economy such as the U.S. in Haiti, many religious organizations have their emissaries to help people in need, but they exchange their help with converting the ones they help to their religion, such as the Christian Orthodox church in Thailand. So, before supporting a charity, we should definitely be aware of every possible detail about it.
The second part of the answer to the initial question, has to do with the actual solution to the problems that people helped by charities face. It is the core of this post, I would say. So, a charity’s supposed aim is to help those in need. Practically speaking, it is true that when we send clothes in children from the third world for example, we help them survive. But, when our aim is to help, this actually means that we will always need to have someone in need. We accept the existence of the problem and we just try to limit its results, but not the problem itself. Every three seconds a child in Africa dies from starvation and every five seconds an adult, while at the same time twelve tones of food are thrown away only in Europe. Instead of accepting our own failure as a society, our own greed, and fight against ourselves and our governments for being responsible of the concentration of the global wealth in the hands of the few, we concentrate in charities. To make things worse, people in need become dependent of the help they are provided with, because they do not stand on their own to face their problems.
If every family around the world could satisfy its needs, children wouldn’t be working and wouldn’t be abused. If women were able to work and earn money, they wouldn’t be abused by their husbands. If health companies were not allowed to profit, people wouldn’t die because they could not afford to pay. And so forth…
I used to participate in charities, but I finally reached the conclusion that I should look at the man in the mirror and fight against injustice in my own government. I would be most pleased to read your views about this subject.
The first part of the answer to this question has to do with the intentions of people who participate in charities. It is for sure that many people care for humanity and try to heal some of its wounds, believing that charities can serve this purpose. Thus, they raise funds or they are even active organizers of campaigns, in order to help those in need. On the other hand we have rich people, millionaires or even billionaires, religious or not organizations and governments as well, that donate great amounts of money to charities. Some of them, although I am personally not aware of one, should be doing this due to their good will. But, most of them do not. It is hard to believe, for example, that those who become rich, such as many businessmen, due to their exploiting of workers and others, care about people in need. This is easily proved by some examples of charities: Many businessmen donate to educational foundations in order to make research for their own business and profit, such as Bill Gates, many governments send humanitarian ambassadors to countries in order to have a control in local economy such as the U.S. in Haiti, many religious organizations have their emissaries to help people in need, but they exchange their help with converting the ones they help to their religion, such as the Christian Orthodox church in Thailand. So, before supporting a charity, we should definitely be aware of every possible detail about it.
The second part of the answer to the initial question, has to do with the actual solution to the problems that people helped by charities face. It is the core of this post, I would say. So, a charity’s supposed aim is to help those in need. Practically speaking, it is true that when we send clothes in children from the third world for example, we help them survive. But, when our aim is to help, this actually means that we will always need to have someone in need. We accept the existence of the problem and we just try to limit its results, but not the problem itself. Every three seconds a child in Africa dies from starvation and every five seconds an adult, while at the same time twelve tones of food are thrown away only in Europe. Instead of accepting our own failure as a society, our own greed, and fight against ourselves and our governments for being responsible of the concentration of the global wealth in the hands of the few, we concentrate in charities. To make things worse, people in need become dependent of the help they are provided with, because they do not stand on their own to face their problems.
If every family around the world could satisfy its needs, children wouldn’t be working and wouldn’t be abused. If women were able to work and earn money, they wouldn’t be abused by their husbands. If health companies were not allowed to profit, people wouldn’t die because they could not afford to pay. And so forth…
I used to participate in charities, but I finally reached the conclusion that I should look at the man in the mirror and fight against injustice in my own government. I would be most pleased to read your views about this subject.