I make people uncomfortable by doing nice things for them. I don't understand it. Somewhere along the way, the practice of random acts of kindness started getting frowned on if they didn't meet a specific standard (usually some WASP suburbanite vision of it ala buying coffee for the next car in line). When I was in labor with my second son, I had brought with me a crafting project to keep me distracted. I overheard a mother in the next bed over (we were all waiting our turn for our c-section delivery) who was very distressed about being a single mother and her lack of goods for taking care of the baby. I asked the nurse if I could give that woman the baby blanket that I had finished, explaining that the entire thing was made from a hypoallergenic yarn and machine washable. The nurse was confused but said it was ok, as long as I stayed in my bed. My solution was to hand the blanket to the nurse to give the woman (which made the nurse visibly uncomfortable). The other mother started crying when she received the blanket.
I told this story to someone I knew and they got offended. I was chastised for making the woman cry when her situation was so bad. I pointed out that I had given her something that was going to help and they proceeded to defame this mother claiming that they were likely a 'welfare queen'. It took a great deal of restraint not to punch them in the face when they started talking smack about this poor woman who was in a hard spot that they knew nothing about.
This isn't the first time I've been told that my random acts of kindness and charity are 'wrong' because I'm giving to the 'wrong' people. Apparently, you're only allowed to give to the poor if you're part of an organization (preferably run by a church that you're a member in good standing), you're only allowed to give money to charitable organizations instead of directly to the people in need, and if you're making things to give away it has to be to charitable organizations instead of to people directly, because the people might sell it.
The general attitude that my acts of kindness and charity to others is going to enable some kind of nefarious behavior on the part of the people who are in need is bullshit. But I run into it a lot around these parts. There's always the assumption that the poor are going to use cash to get drugs or alcohol. There's the attitude that you've been conned out of your money if you pay for an impoverished person's lunch. And this vacillating sense of virtue signaling on if you're giving to a charity. If the charity is one that is considered virtuous based on their public image, you're a bad person for not giving to them when you choose someone else. (I'm looking at you, Salvation Army and your anti-LGBT+ bullshit.) I hate the default assumption that if a charitable organization is nominally associated with Christianity, that means they're better than the other organizations.
I tend to skip the organizations for the most part and just give to people in need as I meet them. Things tend to find me that people are in need of and I pass them along instead of insisting on charging a buck. The only organization that I work with is the spinning guild because they're well vetted and have a good set of contacts for distributing goods to the people who need it. I also picked to do so because they're secular. I know that nobody is going to be getting pressured to convert to anything in order to get what they need to be ok.
But this cultural attitude that all poor people of bad moral character and that by helping them I am enabling them to do nebulous, nefarious things makes me furious. If the homeless person I gave a scarf to decides to sell it, obviously they needed the cash more than the scarf, so it still helped them. When I give things away, they're no longer mine to dictate what happens to them. The same is true about any act of charity. You give it away, it's not yours anymore and you don't get to say boo about what people do with it. Don't like it, don't give it away.
Chaotic good for life. To Hel with the haters.
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