Charity... and revolt.

"[Since Lamartine and the enlightened legislation of 1850s England:] A hundred years later people do not feel so tender toward charity. Our ideal is of a more impersonal justice, of an industrial society where each man's place is honored and secure. In those days only the rich were honored and secure, and charity was the only way to plow back surplus wealth into the nation, the first easy lesson in social justice, and a more wholesome one than the June massacre in Paris." Priscilla Robertson, REVOLUTIONS OF 1848: A SOCIAL HISTORY, p406. 1952: New Jersey, Princeton University Press.

I suspect the Gates Foundation and it's contributors and all the recent reportage of commitments to charity could be considered a kind of sounding of the New World Order's Bell. The governing powers would have all to believe they resided in a philanthropic state. With what's happened to the world economy in the past few years and all the fingers pointing toward the banks, and the ultra-rich - it's not surprising that some would toss the hot potato of surplus wealth. But whom is still in the hot seat?

Laborers in too many nations now are still crying out foul! And not enough of them are in a mood to trust the banks or the ultra-rich no matter how large the published charitable donations become.

What becomes of a nation that puts the weight of its ultimate crisis back on the victims of poverty and corruption? You can not ask an unemployed individual to volunteer or demand they pay for health care, can you? America itself is now lacking any easy, sound solution to this economic crisis. How does a citizenry become motivated to give when its own wealthiest few only appear to care after the economy crumbles. We are a nation of myopic reactionaries it seems. We wait till the credit is maxed out, till the muffler falls off, the roof leaks, the porch steps crumble completely, before we even think MAINTAIN your composure.

Perhaps there would be no such thing as charity if it actually existed as a natural condition of daily life. It would never occur to us to revolt, to question the status quo, would it?