Wellness Calendar: Saturday 14 June

Charity vs. change
Are you ready to be challenged (once again)? Then we’ll begin…
If anyone needs any kind of charity, then as a caring society we have already failed.
How so? Well, there are plenty of resources to go around without having to resort to random acts of kindness. The fact that some people have managed to take the lion’s share of what was once a common treasury, leaving a deficit for others, makes a stronger case for change to our social structure rather than for charity.
Yet perhaps this is the very point of charity: to merely keep people from dying, and to keep people from revolting by giving them just enough to scrape by on. In this sense, charity does a great job of making intolerable situations bearable and preventing any meaningful change that would challenge the order of the day.
Here’s another line of attack to digest…
How many charities have managed to end the very thing they were set up to tackle? Poverty? Homelessness? Mental health? How many of them have wound down because they were so successful in their field that they did themselves out of a job? No. Many charities are perfectly proficient at finding their own niche within the wider framework of governance and so long as they don’t rock any boats, or demand change, they’re permitted to remain. Perhaps the very pinnacle of their achievement is to sit, morally compromised, at a table of the powerful, helping to influence policy, helping to legitimatise a no-change strategy towards some problem or another.
Up for any more?
Is there anything more insulting and degrading than having a system where poor people exist, never mind dividing them into two groups: those that are deserving and those that are undeserving? This is what the concept of charity has been perpetuating since the Poor Law in 1601.
What do you think? Are you a fan of charities? Can you envisage an alternative world where they are not needed?