Ranting to /dev/null

I am about 20 blocks south of some of the poorest communities I've ever seen in my life. I'm tutoring there. Not as close as you, and it's not Harlem... but I can't help but hurt when I see it with my own eyes, y'know? How do we rectify ignoring the homeless asking for change with sincerely wanting to give what we can spare? Let me know what you arrive at. As a matter of fact, remind me of this when we talk next.

Not being able to spare any helps.

Geez, you're right. Is the best we liberal tree hugging bleeding hearts can do is build giant risottos and cover our own (already bad) tracks from 1984, a la Band Aid's "(Feed the World) Do They Know it's Christmastime?"?...Sad.

My sister, Mia (you may have come across her at Covenant and we seem to share mutual Chattanooga connections), and I live in Chicago right by the old Cabrini-Green housing projects, which were notorious in the 70s and 80s and being a place you didn't even want to drive past unless you had a wish to bring harm on yourself. It's an interesting microcosm of urban poverty now hedged in on every side by a sort of yuppie (is this word even still applicable to any segment of society?) borgeousie, lux-consumerist segment. Classic gentrification with the twist that half of the enormous high rises of the projects still cast their shadow over Pottery Barn and Restoration Harware (and I am not bashing these, simply using them for contrast) and are still about a quarter-full mere blocks away. The question of homelessness and poverty has been much on my mind since we migrated up from Chattanooga, where the "bad" section of town I had to walk through was the little stretch from my job at St. John's up Georgia Ave. where some homeless folk used to sit on the picnic benches outside the Pickle Barrel.

I tend to agree with your assessment that politics and personal discomfort seem to supercede flesh-and-blood compassion in some of the most vocal mouthpieces for the poverty issue. Anyhow, I wanted to encourage you that I think medicine is a noble outlet for compassion and that more people should not view "compassion" as something that comes wrapped in protest posters or a life working at a non-profit org dedicated to change, although these can both be good, but something that first needs to infuse the person and then can be expressed in virtually any arena.

One of the most discouraging things for me has been my recent experience on the issue of compassion with Christians, of all people. It has always seemed that many of the reasons I was able to believe and support more personal autonomy with money, decision-making, etc. in the face of political pressure to take more of these choices out of the hands of citizens, were grounded in the belief that the people of Christ should and were putting their money, time, resources where their mouths were. This is true in many places. There are many compassionate people genuinely sacrificing for individual lives, where I believe that impact ultimately needs to come. However, there is something severely wrong in my mind when the church we're involved with can get 85 people to come to a paid wine-tasting event and can barely staff the minimum 4-person team for the once-a-month dinner we serve at a women's shelter. Did I mention this is the only running service activity our church has been involved in over the past 16 months we've been there? Wow.

Anyhow, it is important not to dull ourselves to the actual people we step over every morning on the way to the train. At the same time, I know you recognize the impossibility of affecting genuine change in each and every individual's life whose path even tangentially crosses ours. My solution has been to challenge myself to actively seek out certain relationships where sustained involvement is possible. Short of the few women who I now know by name at the shelter and can actually ask about stuff we talked about the month before, I've yet to really apply myself. This is to my shame. There are opportunities all over our building I'm sure, it's part housing-aid.

Let us know if you have any revelations up in NYC. I enjoy your insight, man.

So I'm not entriely convinced that the risotto was a bad idea. Looking at it from a purely economical standpoint, its likely the the cooks made more money off the dish then they invested in it. If this is indeed the case and those funds are then donated to "concrete things that can be done to ameliorate some of the suffering in the world", how is it any way different then other sorts of fundraisers?

My main objection was that they managed to scrape together 7.5 tons of food, and decided to "invest" it in a fundraiser rather than actually feed hungry people. I mean, if the point is to make hunger go away, then it would seem that the best thing to do with a bunch of food is, well, feed people, not use it to make money to possibly help people somewhere down the line, if you catch my drift.

My problem is that there isn't really an endpoint to this. At some point you've got to stop reinvesting and actually feed people. Furthermore, what happened to the money they raised? It went to a UN group. The UN hasn't exactly impressed me with its efficient or compassionate disbursement of funds. It's definitely impressed me with its ability to bankroll dictators and corrupt politician/burueaucrats, but it doesn't strike me as being particularly able to do much of anything. Sudan? Rwanda? The Middle East? It's had a pretty large hand in the former Yugoslav republics, and has driven their economies into the ground. It turns out that communism is better for national economies than UN bureaucracy.