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Not worried. I donate regularly to the hungry locally and to a maternity home where they save babies from being aborted.
The rest of them are not my business.
But that was a nice try. We are all SO OVER the guilt y'all try to use as a cudgel.
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I hope you have the courtesy and the courage to read my entire post.
I see you proudly display a cross in your avatar. I will take you at your word when you say you donate locally.
Perfect.
As a Reagan conservative, I used to buy into the narrative that private organizations should carry the social welfare load.
But I discovered it's bullshit, and I will explain why.
One day at work during a meeting, I saw through our conference room window a homeless man eating out of a garbage can. After the meeting, I went and found him.
He was mentally ill, and our state thoroughly sucks at taking care of such people. Part of his affliction was that he could not bear to be around other people. This paranoia was part of his illness. He explained this to me when I offered to take him to a shelter. He chose to live in a tent in the woods.
Due to this interaction, and out of tremendous gratitude I feel for the gifts God has given me, I founded two faith-based non-profits to help the people in need in my community.
As a social experiment, I registered one with the government. Any donations to that one would be tax deductible. I did not register the second one. Any donations to that one would not be tax deductible.
In this way, I would be able to see whether donations were for write-offs or came from the heart.
It takes some time to get word around about a new non-profit in town, but as time passed these non-profits grew far beyond my wildest dreams. We had donations from every community leader and every community organization like the Kiwanis, the Chamber of Commerce, and so forth. We also had a large base of individual donors. We have a deeply religious community.
It seemed like the conservative narrative was working.
In addition to my own charities, the local churches were also actively involved in helping the less fortunate.
I did due diligence in the extreme. A person could not just walk in off the street and ask for our help. They would have to be referred to me by a community leader. The fire department chaplain would frequently send people to me. People like that.
I only accepted people who were in dire straits through no fault of their own. A boy with cerebral palsy who needed a new wheelchair his mother couldn't afford. A mentally disabled man who had cancer who needed new clothes because he was wasting away. A family whose breadwinner had died in a car accident. I could go on for hundreds of cases.
One of the more bizarre cases was a Native American who was stabbed in the head by our local Nazis.
I could not believe this was true. But I found his landlord who said the victim never missed a rental payment. I talked to the police. I even talked to the paramedics who treated and transported the guy.
Holy shit, it was for real!
Those of us who ran my charities never took so much as a penny for ourselves. Our administrative costs were paid out of my pocket.
I never once gave our recipients cash. Not a nickel. I paid their utility bills. I paid their rent. I paid for their family members' funeral expenses. I bought them groceries and Christmas presents for their kids. Hundreds and hundreds of things like that.
Years prior, I was in a conversation with some people. A woman was complaining she had some party animal neighbors who had no money to buy groceries, so she gave them money for food. They used the money to buy more booze instead, and she was pissed.
A wise old man said to her, "If you wanted them to have FOOD, you should have given them FOOD!"
And that was the basis for my two organizations and why I never gave anyone cash.
Over time, this work exploded. The donations were phenomenal. Beyond my wildest dreams.
For some strange reason, the tax exempt one faltered while the non tax-exempt one flourished. So I shut down the tax-exempt one.
And here is where the narrative about welfare should be handled privately broke down.
Despite every church in town assisting the needy, and despite various other organizations assisting the needy, and despite my own wildly successful charity assisting the needy, it wasn't enough.
Not nearly enough.
I had to take on the soul-crushing task of performing triage. I had to decide which cases to take, and which ones to refuse. And then I had to look into the eyes of the people I had to turn away.
I had to turn away a woman with ovarian cancer. I'll never forget that one. It will always be with me.
So you can wave your cross around, and you can "regularly" donate to your favorite local charity.
But it isn't enough. Not nearly enough.
