Yearly hello/rant
Yeah, I know I'm never on here. But this is one of those things I was thinking about that I felt like I wanted to say everywhere. (Possibly it's the lack of sleep talking. :p)
One of the things I've been doing during my enforced hiatus from real life due to health reasons is help out at a tiny rural church. (Yeah, I know. But I'm not a member and I managed to get the 74-year-old preacher to do some thinking a few times by getting up and walking *out* of the church when he got his bigot on.) They are what the old churches were supposed to be -- a real resource for the community, constantly looking for people in the area (not just their church) who need help. They take people without transportation to doctors and run a food pantry and are just, in general, most of the time, everything self-identified Christians are supposed to be, but seldom are.
My interactions with them are sometimes problematic, but they've (the pastor and his wife) been married 52 years and he still calls her his "bride" and gets shiny eyes when he talks about how amazed he is that he got her in the first place, even though she's a tiny dumpling who hasn't aged as gracefully as he has (southern men too often *do* care about that) and the two of them really will turn out at two in the morning if a perfect stranger needs their help, and they really do spend out of their own pockets, not just the church funds, to do the helping.
I don't go to Sunday school because a discussion on race led me to ask for a show of hands as to who had Native American blood in their family (for some reason, in this part of the south, this is generally *not* seen as making you not-white, as long as you aren't too type-y. Don't ask me to explain why that rates "a little exotic", I've never understood it) and all but one of them raised her hand, and I pointed out that then all of us were products of an inter-racial marriage at some point. I said "We're all a bunch of mutts" and they laughed, but yeah, that conversation continued on to whether it was a Christian thing to do to deny your biracial grandchildren, and in the spirit of not having my head explode I stopped doing anything but attending church and helping out.
I make food sometimes. I do some respite-care or wound care or medication-sorting or doctor-liaisoning for a few of the elderly members. I sponsor the food kitchen at times. That kind of stuff -- nothing big, just being vaguely useful to the community while I'm benched, on the days I'm able to. I wouldn't be able to do this at all, well, most of it, if it weren't for the church and how the church leadership actively looks for people who need help and are helpless to ask for it in this nearly-serviceless rural county. And all of this rambling is just a prelude to this disclaimer: I am not downing these people, the pastor of the other leaders of the church, not their human worth or their good intentions. Their beliefs are problematic to me in some ways, so I try to make sure I register my disagreement and then move on to helping with the beliefs that they uphold that I share.
POINT OF THIS RAMBLE:
No matter what you do for someone, no matter how much you sacrifice or what you give, it DOES NOT give you the right to turn around and hurt the same people (much less anyone else.)
What am I talking about? Example from six years ago: Man who owed me $400 and bailed on paying, "Look, do you know how many people I've helped? I was nice to X, Y, and Z, and A and B will tell you how I saved their lives!" Me: "Yes, but I'm not any of those people. Helping them doesn't excuse you screwing me over." Him: "..."
That kind of thing, on any level, is always, always wrong. It's the saintly martyr complex on scales large and small, infecting you when hard times hit you and you become Them. When you're panicking and things are tough for you, you think back to how *you* were nice when you had extra, and you simply cannot be one of Them who needs charity, but now the world OWES you for being a good person and you are excused in taking your due. This can go to the extreme of actively damaging people you've helped before, because you can square it with your conscience that they "owe you one."
It doesn't work that way. It just doesn't.
I mean, a loan should be payed back, but when you make a choice to give aid and comfort, however you do it, that's a favor (and even loaning money/things doesn't give you the right to steal from that person later.) It does not become the responsibility of the person you helped to absorb injury from you.
I've been there, I know how easy it is when you're desperate. "I gave and gave and helped and helped and now I'm screwed and how much money did I give their kids,and how much did I sacrifice, and blahblah, so now it is totally righteous that I take something of theirs, whether they offer it or not." The time I'm remembering was in 199-9? I think. (For the record, if you ever see this, Lance, I am deeply sorry I traded your tools for what I needed to take that job at the statuary. I was on the screaming edge of desperate, and at the time I convinced myself I had the right. I suck and I'm sorry, and I would do pretty much anything if I could go back and make a better choice.) I mean, I've *really* been there, with my head full of "must never be a Them, I'm *owed*" because thinking anything else hurt too much and damaged my notions of who I was.
I hope I've learned something this millennium. Gratitude is nice, but you don't have the right to even hold out for that. Helping people to get a "thank you" just plays you into the hands of con artists, who know exactly how to butter you up. People who aren't used to getting help may be anything from grateful to wanting to spit at you for seeing them so compromised. *This does not give you the right to hurt them after you help them.* NOTHING gives you the "right" to abuse, take advantage of, steal from, or settle your problems on someone because you feel you've put them in debt with your choice to assist them.
The ever-amazing tieleen pointed out this really simple fact of physics that condenses all my babble into one easy picture:
There's a boat trying to sail across a lake. You help them across. They start to return and you apply the exact same amount of effort to hindering them that you did to helping them in the first place (think a wind blowing steadily in one direction the whole time.) Always, with no exceptions, THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF IF YOU HAD NEVER INTERACTED WITH THEM AT ALL.
Or, to be a bit more visual, if Superman takes a person up out of a deep hole, then, before they have their feet on solid ground, straps a weight on them and lets go, that person would have been so much better off if Superman had just stayed in Gotham and had sex in Bruce's hot tub. Now, instead of being at the bottom of a deep hole trying to find a way out, they're *smushed* into the bottom of a deep hole like a bug, with a big freaking weight they have to carry out with them, AND they're hurt, and unlikely to accept help from the next person to come along.
I've been on both sides of this. I've worked myself up into a state of righteousness that, marinated in desperation, allowed me to do something I will never be able to fix, and will never stop regretting. I've also been on the side of the rescued, pathetically grateful and then weighted down and dropped so hard I nearly died of it. I get the feelings that decent people can have in rough times that lead them to that kind of behavior, but I also know how unbelievably shattering the cost of that behavior can be to someone vulnerable enough to need help in the first place.
Wow, so. I think I abruptly ran out of steam. Just -- guh. Hi world! I love and miss you even when I vanish! I really do not spend all my time on odd moralizing rants. For some reason I just tend to end up here when I have one. O.o
*hugs to all*
Oh, and the retired racehorses all live a couple of miles down the road, and I can sort of ride them again, and spent most of the summer helping at a camp teaching 6 to 12-year-olds to ride and take care of them, and I truly nearly died of the adorableness, as well as reaching toxic levels on the creation of popsicle-stick picture frames and foam-and-yarn horse puppets.
Also, I'm surrounded by people voting republican because Romney is "more moral, and more reflects Christian values" which seems to mean "Obama is a secret Muslim and is raising Africa to a Muslim super-state to come and eat all our babies." (And hey, did you know his daddy slept with a White Woman?)
Yeah, that's probably not fair, and there are probably thoughtful people educated on the issues out here, but tonight I don't care and soberly stick my tongue out at everyone within a hundred mile radius.
One of the things I've been doing during my enforced hiatus from real life due to health reasons is help out at a tiny rural church. (Yeah, I know. But I'm not a member and I managed to get the 74-year-old preacher to do some thinking a few times by getting up and walking *out* of the church when he got his bigot on.) They are what the old churches were supposed to be -- a real resource for the community, constantly looking for people in the area (not just their church) who need help. They take people without transportation to doctors and run a food pantry and are just, in general, most of the time, everything self-identified Christians are supposed to be, but seldom are.
My interactions with them are sometimes problematic, but they've (the pastor and his wife) been married 52 years and he still calls her his "bride" and gets shiny eyes when he talks about how amazed he is that he got her in the first place, even though she's a tiny dumpling who hasn't aged as gracefully as he has (southern men too often *do* care about that) and the two of them really will turn out at two in the morning if a perfect stranger needs their help, and they really do spend out of their own pockets, not just the church funds, to do the helping.
I don't go to Sunday school because a discussion on race led me to ask for a show of hands as to who had Native American blood in their family (for some reason, in this part of the south, this is generally *not* seen as making you not-white, as long as you aren't too type-y. Don't ask me to explain why that rates "a little exotic", I've never understood it) and all but one of them raised her hand, and I pointed out that then all of us were products of an inter-racial marriage at some point. I said "We're all a bunch of mutts" and they laughed, but yeah, that conversation continued on to whether it was a Christian thing to do to deny your biracial grandchildren, and in the spirit of not having my head explode I stopped doing anything but attending church and helping out.
I make food sometimes. I do some respite-care or wound care or medication-sorting or doctor-liaisoning for a few of the elderly members. I sponsor the food kitchen at times. That kind of stuff -- nothing big, just being vaguely useful to the community while I'm benched, on the days I'm able to. I wouldn't be able to do this at all, well, most of it, if it weren't for the church and how the church leadership actively looks for people who need help and are helpless to ask for it in this nearly-serviceless rural county. And all of this rambling is just a prelude to this disclaimer: I am not downing these people, the pastor of the other leaders of the church, not their human worth or their good intentions. Their beliefs are problematic to me in some ways, so I try to make sure I register my disagreement and then move on to helping with the beliefs that they uphold that I share.
POINT OF THIS RAMBLE:
No matter what you do for someone, no matter how much you sacrifice or what you give, it DOES NOT give you the right to turn around and hurt the same people (much less anyone else.)
What am I talking about? Example from six years ago: Man who owed me $400 and bailed on paying, "Look, do you know how many people I've helped? I was nice to X, Y, and Z, and A and B will tell you how I saved their lives!" Me: "Yes, but I'm not any of those people. Helping them doesn't excuse you screwing me over." Him: "..."
That kind of thing, on any level, is always, always wrong. It's the saintly martyr complex on scales large and small, infecting you when hard times hit you and you become Them. When you're panicking and things are tough for you, you think back to how *you* were nice when you had extra, and you simply cannot be one of Them who needs charity, but now the world OWES you for being a good person and you are excused in taking your due. This can go to the extreme of actively damaging people you've helped before, because you can square it with your conscience that they "owe you one."
It doesn't work that way. It just doesn't.
I mean, a loan should be payed back, but when you make a choice to give aid and comfort, however you do it, that's a favor (and even loaning money/things doesn't give you the right to steal from that person later.) It does not become the responsibility of the person you helped to absorb injury from you.
I've been there, I know how easy it is when you're desperate. "I gave and gave and helped and helped and now I'm screwed and how much money did I give their kids,and how much did I sacrifice, and blahblah, so now it is totally righteous that I take something of theirs, whether they offer it or not." The time I'm remembering was in 199-9? I think. (For the record, if you ever see this, Lance, I am deeply sorry I traded your tools for what I needed to take that job at the statuary. I was on the screaming edge of desperate, and at the time I convinced myself I had the right. I suck and I'm sorry, and I would do pretty much anything if I could go back and make a better choice.) I mean, I've *really* been there, with my head full of "must never be a Them, I'm *owed*" because thinking anything else hurt too much and damaged my notions of who I was.
I hope I've learned something this millennium. Gratitude is nice, but you don't have the right to even hold out for that. Helping people to get a "thank you" just plays you into the hands of con artists, who know exactly how to butter you up. People who aren't used to getting help may be anything from grateful to wanting to spit at you for seeing them so compromised. *This does not give you the right to hurt them after you help them.* NOTHING gives you the "right" to abuse, take advantage of, steal from, or settle your problems on someone because you feel you've put them in debt with your choice to assist them.
The ever-amazing tieleen pointed out this really simple fact of physics that condenses all my babble into one easy picture:
There's a boat trying to sail across a lake. You help them across. They start to return and you apply the exact same amount of effort to hindering them that you did to helping them in the first place (think a wind blowing steadily in one direction the whole time.) Always, with no exceptions, THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF IF YOU HAD NEVER INTERACTED WITH THEM AT ALL.
Or, to be a bit more visual, if Superman takes a person up out of a deep hole, then, before they have their feet on solid ground, straps a weight on them and lets go, that person would have been so much better off if Superman had just stayed in Gotham and had sex in Bruce's hot tub. Now, instead of being at the bottom of a deep hole trying to find a way out, they're *smushed* into the bottom of a deep hole like a bug, with a big freaking weight they have to carry out with them, AND they're hurt, and unlikely to accept help from the next person to come along.
I've been on both sides of this. I've worked myself up into a state of righteousness that, marinated in desperation, allowed me to do something I will never be able to fix, and will never stop regretting. I've also been on the side of the rescued, pathetically grateful and then weighted down and dropped so hard I nearly died of it. I get the feelings that decent people can have in rough times that lead them to that kind of behavior, but I also know how unbelievably shattering the cost of that behavior can be to someone vulnerable enough to need help in the first place.
Wow, so. I think I abruptly ran out of steam. Just -- guh. Hi world! I love and miss you even when I vanish! I really do not spend all my time on odd moralizing rants. For some reason I just tend to end up here when I have one. O.o
*hugs to all*
Oh, and the retired racehorses all live a couple of miles down the road, and I can sort of ride them again, and spent most of the summer helping at a camp teaching 6 to 12-year-olds to ride and take care of them, and I truly nearly died of the adorableness, as well as reaching toxic levels on the creation of popsicle-stick picture frames and foam-and-yarn horse puppets.
Also, I'm surrounded by people voting republican because Romney is "more moral, and more reflects Christian values" which seems to mean "Obama is a secret Muslim and is raising Africa to a Muslim super-state to come and eat all our babies." (And hey, did you know his daddy slept with a White Woman?)
Yeah, that's probably not fair, and there are probably thoughtful people educated on the issues out here, but tonight I don't care and soberly stick my tongue out at everyone within a hundred mile radius.