Giving

Well, my son has a decision to make. It is time for him to open up the “Donate” section of his Money Savvy Pig and make his first real charitable contribution. For someone his age, there’s a moderately significant amount of money in there, probably around $20. Whenever he actually manages to earn his allowance, at least $1 (usually 25-33% of what he gets, as he earns it on a sliding scale) has to be put aside for giving.

Now, as we reach the end of the year, it’s time for this money to go. There are plenty of options, and I’ve tried to narrow it down to a few that would appeal to a kid. The first in my mind is Child’s Play, the charity established by the guys from Penny Arcade. It helps provide toys and entertainment for children’s hospitals around the world. This thing keeps growing every year, and I think my son would be glad to help give sick kids with something to play with. In addition, Child’s Play is very efficient about translating donations to goods; in fact, thanks to their rather unique setup, I can’t think of many that get more bang for their buck.

My wife suggested letting him bundle up the money and go put it in a Salvation Army bucket. I have to say that I liked the suggestion; I hadn’t even considered it as an option. It’s something he’s done before, and putting a lot of money in there, piece by piece, will have a visceral impact. The ringer is likely to enjoy it (I know I would’ve back when I volunteered for it). I’m generally not enthused by religious charities; it’s part of the reason I’m not really considering Worldvision, and am suspicious of Heifer International until I find out more. While both those groups do good, essential work, I’m wary of any group that mixes proselytizing with charitable endeavor. Again, the Salvation Army has a decent record there; while still a religious sect (odd how most people don’t realize the Salvation Army is an actual church), the focus has long since shifted toward the charitable efforts. I’ve got a soft spot for the Salvation Army. I’ve done work for them before, and a Salvation Army officer married my parents, because the person originally scheduled to preside over their wedding could not make it. So, I’m really considering this.

I originally conceived of doing this whole giving thing through one of the “catalog charities”. I think it’s just cool to consider sitting down with a kid and scrolling through all the things your money could buy for someone in need. It let’s them know exactly where the money is going, which has a stronger impact. Will it be vaccines, a working animal, or a water purifier? Those questions are things that kids can learn about and decide to answer on their own. That said, I’m somewhat less enthused after doing my own research. Most of the big guns in the “catalog” game mix the giving with religious proselytizing; in particular, World Vision bugs me. Heifer International was founded as a religious organization, but unlike World Vision, they don’t seem to emphasize it anymore. However, I have other complaints about Heifer (and these apply to most of the catalog charities). When you read the fine print, what it says is, “We’re actually going to spend your money wherever we need it, regardless of what you said you wanted us to use it for.” That whole “choose what you are giving toward” riff is just the hook to get the money. That is bloody disappointing, and I don’t want to get a kid excited about giving to something they really aren’t giving to. Now, I can understand it, to an extent. You don’t want to be overloaded with 10,000 cute little lambs when what you really need is a well pump. I can especially see it from back in the day when it was an actual printed catalog that people were choosing from. These days, I think the web allows you to keep a decent tally and adjust the elements available for giving. Take a little off the top for administrative costs, and you can probably run it as advertised (Although, as I check my facts before I go on, it seems that Heifer has altered this somewhat, and only redistributes funds after the need you have designated in general has been met. That puts them back in the running, possibly the lead.). The only one of these groups that I’m still really considering is Oxfam. It’s a secular charity, and while it still distributes your money as it sees fit, Oxfam is at least up front about it. Instead of burying it deep in the legalese, Oxfam puts it right out there that your “purchase” is a symbolic representation. Although, politically, Oxfam has been getting a little extreme. It fits their mission, I guess, but I frankly don't want my money going toward a protests in front of the G8 summit. If anyone else knows of a similar charity that actually uses the money exactly how you tell it to, I’d be glad to hear about it.

Those are really the big options. I’m still hunting around, but I think those are the ones I’ll let him choose from. We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully, it’ll take on it’s own appeal, and he’ll put more than he’s required to into his bank over the next year. Maybe it'll also spur me on. I don't give enough, myself.

Not this again...

I hate idiots. In particular, I hate idiots who promote this “War on Christmas” crap. Admittedly, a lot of the target audience for that stuff aren’t stupid; they are just ignorant of the origins of all their “eternal traditions from the beginning of time,” and how young most of those traditions actually are. Most of the people actually advancing the culture war crap know all this stuff; they’re just playing to an audience that doesn’t.

We’ll set aside the whole “savior half-god born of a virgin signified by a star in the sky” thing, as that’s a whole other round of cultural theft. Suffice to say, Yeshua bin Yosef ain’t the first in line for that story by a couple of millennia. Anyway…

First off, solstice celebrations have been around since people realized that the seasons changed. I can’t point to many ancient cultures that didn’t have one. The ancients liked them a party, too. This was the “last bash before the long dark winter” sort of thing, when you had eat all the stuff that you couldn’t store and make all the religious observances that were needed to ensure the spring would come. Lots of our “modern” holiday traditions have their roots in old-school paganism. Hell, the Christian bible specifically prohibits bringing in trees for the solstice as a pagan observance.

And that’s just one example. Talking about "Yule" is all about sacrifices and hunts and about moving from one season to the next, and is a Northern European tradition. Holly and mistletoe are deeply significant in old Celtic and other pagan religions. While the exchanging of gifts actually follows from the Christian story, they are by far not the only solstice celebration with a similar tradition.

A second round of issues stems from the fact that the only reason the “Christ Mass” is located at the winter solstice was when the old Roman church tried to co-opt the other celebrations going on at the same time. The Roman celebration Saturnalia just happened to be at the solstice, and it was a real party, from all accounts. Wild bacchanals, orgies, massive parties of all types; without something to compete, the early church was at a disadvantage. So, in response, they basically said, “Oh, yeah, our god was born around now, too. Woohoo!” This, despite the fact that from their own descriptions, the birth time was likely somewhere in the spring. Until then, Christmas was a fairly minor event; it was just another named day in the church calendar, like Michaelmas. It got scaled up to compete with other prevalent religions, and in the process, co-opted some of their aspects. These aspects were much more evident in the middle ages. The holiday tradition of wassailing (precursor to modern caroling) was basically a bunch of revelers going from house to house demanding food and drink. That’s no so much what the Christmas Warriors would like us to think the holiday was about. Other pagan observances continued, as well.

As we approach the modern era, Christmas diminishes even further in importance, particularly for the Protestant denominations. In early colonial America, groups such as the Puritans repeatedly outlawed it as a thinly veiled pagan festival. By the Revolutionary period, it was virtually uncelebrated beyond a household level. This changed due to Queen Victoria’s choice of husband. Victoria married a member of the German royalty of the house of Saxe-Coburg, who brought with him to England a mass of holiday traditions. Christmas was still celebrated across continental Europe, but it looked a lot more like Saturnalia than Easter. Yes, the church was treating it as a pretty major holiday, but the populace still ended up treating it like any other solstice celebration. Traditions such as the Christmas tree, Yule log, and general holiday decoration carried into the British royalty; as Victoria was the standard for behavior in the Empire, these traditions spread as the fashionable thing to do, first among the nobles, then the upper classes, then to everyone else. Combined with the immensely popular work of Charles Dickens, the image of the modern Christmas celebration was born in Europe. This eventually carried over to the United States, the citizens of which were just as crazy about emulating Victoria as anyone else at the time. And, ultimately, because of that emulation, Christmas as it is understood in the English-speaking world is little more than a thin veneer of whitewash over much older pagan customs. Even at the point that the U.S. established it as a holiday in the mid-19th century, it was done so in purely secular terms. Once twentieth-century commerce and marketing got involved, the revels were in full swing, and they had nothing to do with religion.

So, knowing all that, it’s hard to take seriously anyone who thinks that Christ actually had much of anything to do with our modern understanding and celebration of Christmas. Admittedly, a lot of people don’t know this; I can’t blame the ignorant for having a different understanding (though I can blame them for not understanding the history of their own damned religion). The ones that get to me are the people who know this perfectly well, and ignore that knowledge in favor of exploiting the ignorance of the former group. That pisses me off. While I’m not a religious believer, I still get angry at the manipulation of those that do believe. What bug me are the con artists sidling up to the average believer and saying, “That guy over there? He’s trying to keep you from even mentioning Christmas. It’s because he’s afraid of Jesus, and wants to drive him out of the public square. That way the devil will win. By the way, I have a TV show and a book where I talk about all this, maybe you should check them out, if you love Jesus, that is.”

It’s that kind of thought that drives me buggy. Nowhere has anyone ever tried to legally stop anyone from saying “Merry Christmas”. Sure, the majority of people in the US (religious or not) celebrate Christmas, and it’s appropriate to greet them that way. However, a significant minority celebrates other holidays or none in the same period. Recognizing this, many businesses use the term “Happy Holidays” so as not to make an inappropriate greeting to a sizeable chunk of their customer base. Many individuals do the same out of common courtesy, because you don’t know the affiliation of everyone you speak to. Hell, I didn’t realize one of my friends in school was Jewish until he left out of a conference to go to his Bar Mitzvah. A sizable chunk of the people around here are Jehovah’s Witnesses, who don’t celebrate holidays in this manner. Throw in Muslims, adherents of the many varieties of Hindu faiths, Zoroastrians, etc, and there are frankly a lot of people to whom, “Merry Christmas” just doesn’t apply. And that, frankly, is great.

See, the United States is supposed to be a place for anyone who loves freedom, and wants a chance to be something. To facilitate that, we have a Constitution and Bill of Rights that guarantee equal protection under the law, regardless of extraneous factors like religion. Such guarantees are a protection of the minority from the tyranny of the majority (something many Jews and minority religionists can historically point to, given the history of state-sponsored pogroms and persecution throughout the nations of Europe that had official churches). While many may complain that this can result in a “tyranny of the minority,” I’ve never understood the idea. Ensuring that everyone has at least equal rights to belief and expression means that you can’t mandate or favor one over any other (or even none); that’s not a “tyranny”. The way we half-ass it in this country still barely makes it a “plurality”. However, many in a majority won’t see it that way. That’s where this “War on Christmas” comes in; rather than accommodate and be pleasant to a small minority, a chunk of the majority would rather act like jackasses. That’s what confuses me; no one has ever actually tried to legally stop someone from saying “Merry Christmas”. Sure, businesses may have a policy of using another phrase; that, however, is business, and most companies want to cover as many potential customer bases as possible. It’s the equivalent of being required to say, “Do you want fries with that?” It’s not a constitutional speech issue; it’s a company policy issue. An individual on their own time can “Merry Christmas” their ass off all over the public square.

A final place this comes up as a fight is where it actually becomes a Constitutional issue; government involvement. Usually, this takes the form of holiday displays on public ground, such as a public park or city office building. Since these places are recognized as representing the government, they can’t take a stance favoring or disfavoring a particular religion. That means that any public space allowing for holiday displays that are in any way non-secular (such as a crèche or menorah) must be open to all religions’ holiday displays, as well as secular displays. In effect, where they want to put religious speech, they have to allow all speech (I can’t believe the crapstorm that comes up every year when secularist and humanist groups put up signs essentially saying, “Be cool to each other” next to religious displays). This is, again, to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Even in a town that is 99.99% Christian, the government must not do anything indicating that it disfavors that .01% that isn’t; to do so could indicate that laws will be applied unequally due to religious discrimination. Coralius has a good post from back in the day as to why this is important. The ideal solution is for government functions and spaces to get out of the religious display business and get on with the work of governing. Some people just don’t seem to get that, though, and when you try to make them apply the law equally, cry about “persecution”. It’s not “persecution” to not get special treatment. However, people in the USA seem so ignorant of their own Constitution, laws, and history that they don’t understand what real persecution is. So to them, this is a “War on Christmas”. To everyone else, they just sort of look like idiots. It drives me nuts that people in such a diverse nation can be so provincial; this place is full of amazing and astounding people, and I really hope that the loud-mouthed and ignorant are actually a small minority. Extremists usually get the most press, in any case. The very fact that they have the right to yell about such things warms me. That’s what freedom is about; you have the right to act like an idiot, and I have the right to think you’re an asshole because of it.

Happy Holidays, y’all.

Yeah, I'm strange

I get sentimental about weird things. Songs are the biggest category, probably – there are more songs that can take me back than anything else. It’s not usually actual memories that come up, though; rather, it’s more likely a fantasy of myself singing that song at an appropriate point in my life. This happens all the time. It’s probably the biggest remaining way that I obsess about the past. I’ve gotten over the specifics of most of my awkwardness, social gaffes, and missed opportunities – I’m much happier in my own skin than I ever had hoped to be. Still, my fantasy life often revolves around having had some socially acceptable talent back in the day: singing, playing an instrument well (as compared to how I actually did it), the ability to communicate with my peers…the list goes on. Writing and singing music tops the list, though. I imagine performances of virtually every song I like, or what it would have been like to introduce that piece to the world. The fantasies I’ve constructed also feed my anxieties about actual performance (see this), though I’m getting very slightly better there.

In any case, this came up because “The Rainbow Connection” just popped up on my player while I was looking for something to write about. The first place my mind went was to put me in the place of the artist. I know, of course, that singing along and enjoying the music is part of what it’s all about, but I invest so much possibility and regret into songs this way that they sometimes drive me to tears for no good reason. The habit is so entrenched with some songs that I break at the opening chords because I wish so badly that the song had been mine. I barely have any conscious control over it, because the fantasy has been ingrained for years.

Again, I’m weird. Of course, were I normal, I wouldn’t be half as interesting.