Oh, the qualms of being liberal!

One of the classes I am substituing for this morning is watching "Oliver Twist", the Roman Polansky version (which I recommend, and would do so more highly if I could picture ever being in the mood to see it of my own volition). My favorite quote comes after Oliver has been thrown in the coal shed at Mrs. Sowerberry's. Mr. Bumble tells her he never would have behaved violently (after his mother was called a whore) if she hadn't fed him meat. "Oh," she exclaims "the qualms of being liberal!" Because I helped this poor boy, she is moaning, he had the strength to rebel against me and cause me trouble!

The spirit of open-heartedness and generosity that should pervade the helping of other people is still often missing in today's society. Republican cries we have heard this week that an economic stimulus package that relies on the creation of jobs will be ultimately ineffective reeks of this same timidity in extending oneself. "We want to help poor people, we just think the best way to do it is to decrease the taxes on all the short-selling I've been doing in the stock market this year." Um, yeah. (Really, Bucky, your idea for a blog post was to compare Republicans to a Dickensian antagonist? Has it been that slow a week? Are you that bitter for not having known about short-selling ETF's yourself at the beginning of the year? Let's see where this goes...)

I have confidence and faith in the benefits of generosity and forgiveness because I have been the recipient of so much of both in my life. I'll have paid off my Perkins loans long before I can hope to have returned even a fraction of the love and care I have received to the the world. But the small ways in which I have been able to taste these ineffable emotions sustain and uplift me when I feel overwhelmed by the pervasive messages of our society about the money, power and comfort that successful people "should" be focusing on. Benjamin Franklin wrote early on in his experiments with patronage that someone is more likely to help you out after they have had one opportunity to give you assistance than if they owe you a favor for a kindness done to them. He recognized that people got more of a lift from lending him a book than from having him do something they needed for him.

This same sentiment expresses itself so fundamentally in all the cultures that I have lived in. Mo Zi wrote that our human instinct to help others manifests itself in the natural reaction to save a baby teetering on the edge of a well. Nasreddin Hoca tales in Turkey highlight the astute cleverness of helping your neighbors and the ways in which it benefits you in the long-term with stories about borrowed pots that "magically" reproduce while in his possession. This combination of noetic and cultural knowledge fills me with hope, and is sustaining.