No. 15: Contribute to good causes. Pick a charity or two and set up autopay.
It takes more than a bowl to bail a boat.
The Old Truck on Tyranny.
This week continues a series inspired by Tim Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyranny and the “20 Lessons” derived from his study.
No. 15: Contribute to good causes. Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life. Pick a charity or two and set up autopay.
Helena, Montana, was a gold rush town. Search for the “Four Georgians” if you would like to learn that story. Those who study such things know folks got reliably richer opening stores selling pans and pickaxes to the miners than by digging for gold of their own.
A prosperous town sprang up, full of now-decaying mansions and one of the finest stained-glass windowed cathedrals this side of the Atlantic. We hear its bells from our house every. single. day.
All the historic gold-digging revealed we have decent clay hereabouts, as well as gold. Brick-making ensued to build the mansions, resulting in a set of beehive kilns now used for music and the arts.
The Archie Bray is a world-class ceramic arts foundation, which also still sells clay. It has turned this very small capitol city into a global destination for potters and sculptors. The ceramic arts community here is so large that locals have also founded and grown the Clay Arts Guild and Omerta Arts to keep the local clay scene flowing. Needs were present, so folks got organized to meet them.
You had better get your tickets, this event sells out.
For several months each spring, our prodigious local pottery scene throws and fires bowls. All of them “soup bowl” sized, but there are no limits on style or design. Quality varies. If you have an eye, some at least regionally big names in this field have their work mixed into the stacks.
Hundreds and hundreds of bowls are made and delivered to our once-stylishly Moorish-revival Civic Center for the annual Empty Bowls event, held by Helena Food Share. A long line queues outside as thoughtful locals wait patiently for their turn to pass by long tables covered in bowl-stacks to select a bowl of their own. Some are seconds, most are decent craft, a few are gorgeous, all hold soup.
Once you settle your jacket at one of the dozens of big round tables arrayed under the tragically 70s ballroom chandeliers, a soup bar awaits at one or the other the ends of the hall. You fill your bowl, take your seat, tuck in, slather a slice of local baguette with butter, and proceed to chatter with your table-mates over a simple, expensive, fund-raising supper. At some point, words will be shared from the mic-stand about how our local food bank is doing; highlighting successes and outlining the endless, unmet needs of the poor and hungry among us. Folks who cannot afford these soup bowls.
The bowl you pick is yours to keep. In turn, after a lot of effort by a lot of people to put that uniquely-crafted ceramic bowl full of all-you-can-eat, catered soup in your hands, the food bank clears maybe thirty bucks a bowl. Maybe.
Urvashi Vaid showed up on my gaydar in the very early 1990s, while she was the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. I read her book Virtual Equality, and took away a core piece of advice, one which Snyder has also adopted. Pick one (or two) organizations whose mission you support and sign up as a recurring donor. Give your causes something low-effort and reliable. Pay these donations like a tax.
Never get fooled into thinking occasional soup bowls create change. Real change takes long-term commitment. The kind that comes from reasonably well-paid staffers developing deep expertise and broad connections while relying on stable budgets, year over year.
Yes, it is also true that the need to privately create and sustain social-service organizations — like food banks for the far more starving people than we may think — is on some level stupid. A truly decent, humane society would not need privately funded food banks to throw soup bowl parties to pay their bills.
Anyone who has shopped at Costco knows that bulk-purchasing is the way to save money. Services needed by virtually everyone (education, healthcare, basic nutrition, electricity, roads, sewers, police, etc.) should be created and managed as public utilities to ensure the lowest basic service costs for all, not just those wealthy enough to drive a bargain. The rich can always buy more and better of anything they want. They always have.
But, that is not the world we live in right now. Right now, the greediest have managed to wrest control of our democracy, and are busily looting our shared assets. This can and will change. But, only if we sign up and commit to creating changes for the long haul.