What’s it gonna’ take for people to start helping each other out? I mean really help and not just pose with limbless kids for photo-ops to abolish land mines on another continent or stage sing-alongs to stay the inevitable advance of genetically altered foods. This is the sort of factory charity for show that’s usually run off by celebrities on behalf of internationally publicized agencies - filler on an entertainment news show. All that anyone’s looking for is press good enough to draw attention away from an ugly truth. And forget about the many ribbon campaigns that help the ideologically challenged decide what cause to support based on their favourite colour. In the end you wind up with a bunch of people wearing ribbons around months after the awareness week is over and their good intentions no more than absent minded evidence of maybe once giving a shit. Best of all, you can always indulge your sense of right-doing and leave your spare change in one of those clear plastic coin boxes that sit in front of the register at your local fast food franchise and think you‘re making a magnanimous contribution to any thing from cystic-fibrosis to the local humane society. What a load of shit.
I’m not cynical enough to deny that there are some organized charities that do good work - so I won’t bother. Sure, a movie star might raise awareness of refugees from war torn Somewhere-in-Africa I’ve never heard of and make pity contributions pay to have a well drilled but they don’t stick around to see it appropriated by the same heavily armed men who displaced the refugees to begin with. And granted, national fundraising campaigns do raise millions of dollars for medical research but I know a guy who owes his lavish lifestyle (including an 11,000 square foot lake-front home, boats, stables, servants and winters in Bora-bora) to the chunk he allocates himself every year from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. And yes my dear sainted mother gave a nice young girl at the market two dollars for a "tear" stained bit of green ribbon that would show the world she supported…something about the environment or legalized marijuana - the girl wasn't too coherent. And I worked out of a Wendy's where the coin boxes might as well have said “Managers' Laundry Money” instead of claiming to support adoption. But what the Hell, nobody`s perfect. Right?
Funny thing is that I take what I cherish most about charity came out the mouth of the only guys more than twelve people ever thought was perfect. He gave a famous sermon on a hill in the Middle East to a lot of people who were probably just as miserable and run down as a lot of people today. He laid down some crazy cool stuff about loving your neighbours as you love yourself and that doing good works to one another was the best way to follow the example he was trying to set. These were Great Ideas in their purest sense but I do believe the Man overestimated his audience’s attention span. I can imagine walking away from that meeting with every good intention under the Son - maybe even helping an old Pharisee to cross a Roman highway - only to get home and yell at the wife for not having my goat and rice ready and kick the dog for failing to honour his master. I can imagine that because that’s the same day to day shit that people pull nowadays. It doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the message, I just think the meaning’s been getting lost in translation over time.
Know what else I think? I think the message is a lot easier to swallow without the divinity starching it up. "Be good to each other and get into Heaven." Yeah, that never led to any despicable double standard. How many people do you know who only do good works towards people who give them stuff or have the power to have stuff given? Bah! There are people on my street whose kids where jean jackets in the dead of winter and can't give their families enough to eat. Forget land mines in Africa, forget Farm-Aid and ribbons for children done away with by the fear and hate towards homosexuals - make a difference in your own backyard.
I can hear people asking, "What's this all got to do with the stupid fucking title of this post?" Well, I'm sure that everyone's heard the phrase before even if they don't know what it means (or, more specifically, my meaning). A hook and a crook are pretty much the same thing except that a hook's got a pointy end. Shepherds in the Bible stories I used to like were always carrying crooks to lift lost lambs out of holes or to prod the flocks into what passes for order with sheep. Hooks are most commonly seen on the ends of fishing line to pierce and pull a fish into a boat or onto shore. My point is that charity work usually takes the gentler crook approach and that, if something doesn't change in our attitudes, people needing the help might go for the hook and take what they want because they don't have what they need.
There...satisfied, now go out and do some good already.
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