“Charity”: Donation or giving back what is rightfully theirs?
I was emailed a pretty challenging quote today :
“When we give to the poor we are not being generous; we are merely returning to them that which we have withheld from them.” (Source unknown)
I have to admit, I feel pretty chuffed with myself when I ‘give to the poor’ in whatever form. But this quote makes a valid and uncomfortably challenging point, especially given the increasingly skewed structure of the world’s wealth distribution, shown in the graphs below.
Maybe the quote should even be a bit stronger: “We are merely returning to them that which we have stolen from them”, or at least “We are merely returning to them the wealth we have inherited from those that stole from them” (even though the lack of conciseness in that one does not make for a good quote)
Source: ‘The Community Solution’, Powerpoint Presentation “Energy and Inequity”, available from http://www.communitysolution.org/problem.html
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