Charity And The Status Quo

Three weeks ago or so, I sent an app in to volunteer at the Boston Food Bank. I didn't hear back from them, but I did hear back from a 12-step program for druggies. So I went and have been volunteering in the kitchen at this program for some time now. The kitchen crew are mostly either recovered addicts or students doing volunteer work; I haven't met any people doing penal community service yet.

Helping people is not my primary motivation. Rather, I enjoy the activity - doing things, making things happen, even the very menial - and of course talking to the other people, extracting their human knowledge and experience and adding it to my own, listening to their life stories and what wisdom they can provide about life. The manager of the kitchen, for example, is this hardscrabble guy who lost his family and his life to drugs, then with much hard work won it back. He has long experience in the hospitality industry and managing food prep - a career benevolent despot of the kitchen - and learning his methodology is interesting. There's another frequent volunteer, also a recovered drug addict, one of those highly itinerant but hardworking black people; it's interesting listening both to his ideological/metaphysical rantings about haves/havenots, and also about his travels. There are other people I also enjoy the benefits of taking their knowledge and experience, in the sense of getting to know and understand them and how they think and relate to the world. I care very little about "making friends", only developing a better understanding of others.

The kitchen gets a huge volume of food donations, in the form of canned goods and day-old bread. Most effort is spent prepping it for storage - only for it to be wasted a few days later. Most of what is prepared is fed to staff. This is distasteful to me, but like I said my aim is not necessarily to help people, only to keep myself busy and take what I want from the other volunteers. In any event, this corroborates my understanding of the field from what I have read in the past: getting donations is easy, the problem is most of these food banks and such do not have the means to store and distribute the donations.

The other day, I received a belated email from the Greater Food Bank thanking me for my application and asking me to register on the site. The site did not make any connection with my prior application when I registered - I re-entered my personal info from scratch, signed up for a work period, and showed up.

The food bank facility was situated in a light industrial area near Andrew station. I had to walk over an unpaved road running parallel to a cement factory to get there.

My initial impression of the interior was quite disheartening. It was a very large, very modern, very clean and well-maintained place, with promotional banners, posters, and iconographs, and a large LCD screen running a promo track along one wall. The latter was particularly a red flag. It's consistently my experience that organizations, especially non-profits, that focus their efforts on being "receptive" or welcoming are invariably ineffectual and merely fiefs for overpaid non-profit executives who prance around engaging in circlejerks and hobnobbing, aggrandizing themselves as do-gooders, when the truth is they just want money, status, and the security and ease of non-profit administration, and care nothing about actually helping people. They typically do not possess real administrative skills, and go to great lengths to isolate themselves from the organizations they manage. I have seen this a great deal in the many non-profit settings I've seen over the years.

A jaded secretary - overweight young black female, of course - told me to go up to the second floor, and so I did. The second floor consisted of a catwalk running along a wall featuring detailed promotional posters printed on pastel-colored PVC plates about the Boston Food Bank; amongst them was one touting their nutritional standards. On the other side was a vast warehouse area that reminded me of nothing more than the final scene of [i]Raiders of the Lost Ark[/i]. In the warehouse area, there was no movement, and most of the pallets were either empty or filled with pallets of visibly empty boxes. The catwalk branched off into massive offices - mostly empty - and conference rooms, all very modern and sparkling clean, with expensive upholstery and such.

I arrived at the work area. An individual whom I at first guessed was retarded - white, with thick, heavy, unmoving facial features, never looking at his surroundings, dimly messing with his task in an aimless, redundant manner - was putting oranges in bags in a vast and otherwise motionless room. The supervisor, a gregarious Haitian, walked up and asked me to help, so I did, throwing away bad oranges and bagging good ones. Except, they were all pretty much bad; all had crackling or dry rot, most were at least partly blackened, almost none had any edible flesh inside, it was clear all these cheap reject oranges had inside was a bit of fluid and pulp.

I initially did not attempt to address this person. Eventually, another volunteer arrived, and I struck up a conversation. I do not remember his name. He said he was from Seattle, a student at Boston University, majoring in advertising. He said he intended to get a degree in business. Interestingly, he said, advertising is part of the school of communications and not marketing, business or psychology. He had no ambitions, and after initial banter he, too, silently fiddled with the inedible oranges.

Eventually I spoke to the other guy, whom I had believed was retarded. I opened the conversation in a matter-of-fact way, to make this person not feel a stigma: "Are you here doing community service for parole, or as an educational requirement?" "Uh, I'm in high school, I'm doing this for an...internship kinda deal thing..." he said, seemingly distastefully. I saw where this guy was coming from. "High school, huh...I had a rough time of it, I was actually asked to leave and never come back. And I didn't, I took the GED and never looked back." 75% true - I was asked to leave, and did take the GED, but I implied I didn't graduate which is not true.

"So you intend to go to college?" "Yeah, gotta pay for it..." "Community college is really good." "Yeah, it's cheap, is the thing." "Yeah, it's actually a better education than a university - more practical, more hands-on, more employment oriented...typically, university is basically a waste of time." I had managed to pry this person open a bit. Lower-class youth like this kid are very interesting because my initial perception that he was a retard, although mistaken, nonetheless, I feel, hints at a deeper truth - the problem with these people is that they are not sufficiently engaged by their environments as children and have low self-esteem and self-actualization. I believe the solution is to make society more accessible and engaging - create parks and institute daycare and posthumous deification.

I had arrived at 8:55, but apparently the shift that was to start at 9:00 actually started at 9:30. The room quickly flooded with high school kids, who started picking aimlessly at objects on a conveyor belt. As if by cue, two portly guys in suits carrying fancy water bottles they did not sip from came through and one of them gave the other a spiel about the place. A young black man with a heavy nickel-steel alloy ring studded with zircons - clearly doing community service - showed up. A dolley on a manual forklift got stuck on a cargo elevator. The Haitian showed us how to correct the issue - apply more pneumatic pressure to the dolley's suspension. The dolley was loaded down with about a ton of milk, and I couldn't move it alone. With the help of the paroler, we managed to move the dolley. I turned to him. "Thanks a lot, I didn't do much at all." He smiled. Although I am very racist, unlike most white people, I am not bigoted, and I find that black people are often jaded about how white people do not treat them as people; they are often surprised and receptive when I do so. I have a huge ego, and it has to an enormous extent displaced my superego and id, making me less susceptible to bigotry than most people.

We spent the next three hours putting the inedible oranges in bags then putting the bags in used banana boxes. The Haitian showed me a rather interesting technique for separating lid from box - insert foot and pull. We finished, rather inefficiently; most of the time, the black guy just sat there, fiddling. I didn't particularly blame him; he didn't see himself as a stakeholder in what was going on, and I believe this is why black people in general often have work ethic / honesty issues - because they are not stakeholders in society, they see themselves on the fringe, or outside the system, they do not mentally buy into the social contract, a perception which is not unreasonable.

The Haitian told us to take our break in the "training room", which was labelled "Training Room 01" on a plastic bezel on the wall. He jokingly said something about there being snacks "if you can find any of them that can be eaten." I opened all the cabinets and drawers. There were cheap corn-based jelly snacks, peanut butter crackers, a beat-up but sealed can of Pringles, honey-mustard flavor, and a large quantity of individually packaged candies of all sorts. In the fridge there was a collection of sealed water bottles of diverse brands and a 2L bottle of ginger ale. I poured myself some ginger ale, took some chips and candy, napkins, and a sealed pack of disposable utensils and napkin and sat down. It was pretty gross. A few minutes later, all the kids flooded into the room and I excused myself. I wandered in the hall for a moment before this woman with an expensive haircut and clothes walked up to me rather imperiously.

"Are you with the morning group?" "Hmm?" "Are you with the morning group?" "I do not understand." "Are you a volunteer?" "Yes. The training room is overrun with the kids, though." "Oh...well...you seemed kind of lost. If you want...you can hang out over there, by the gantry..." "Ok. And you are...?" "The director of this place." She wore no nametag; she then walked back into the office, which of course has its own break facilities. I stood by the gantry, where there was actually no sitting area.

I didn't even bother staying for the afternoon; no point in wasting time sorting goods in silence. I arrived home to find an automated email thanking me for my contribution that morning. At 4PM I received a second automated email thanking me for my efforts during session I actually didn't attend.

Boarding the bus home, this young druggie jumped onto the bus. "Can I have your attention please I need help I'm going to detox tomorrow but I need some change to take the train there help me please my bodys about to give out I need detox." No one said anything. Some girls behind him giggled. "Fuckers...no one helps..." He walked along the aisle, addressing individual passengers, including me. "Help me please..." I looked at him. "What's your story?" "I need detox I'm going tomorrow but I need some change can you help me-" I cut him off. "I mean, what's your story...How old are you?" "28" "What was your parents' trade?" "Trade?" "What did they do?" "Uh, my mom's an alcoholic, and my dad's...dead...that's why I need help me please so I can take the train to get detox-" He started the spiel again and I gave him a basilisk gaze. He stopped talking. "Fucker..." He pointed to a well-dressed woman to my left. "She was gonna help..." He got off the train.

I got off at my stop and headed home. My train runs along BU, so there's always a ton of these shallow, over-ambitious, useless girls who try to get noticed by constantly fidgeting and tapping their heels loudly. I despise and ignore them.

I got home and began to read an article about nuclear waste storage iconography....

Generally speaking, I don't believe in the power of charity to help people. I believe that charity and non-profits inevitably act as agents of the status quo.