The Positive Value of Philanthropy July 2, 2023 Dr. Roger Ray
What keeps our brains growing and evolving? We have our “lizard brain” that is based in the amygdala that regulates our fight or flight instincts. Our executive decision-making function is in the prefrontal cortex. Our self-awareness comes from the insula.
I strongly believe there is also a philanthropic center of our brains, which is powered by the production of oxytocin. This is where altruism and compassion live. Where our connection to one another resides. Not just our spirit of giving, but what generates and sustains our generosity and care for one another.
by John E. Kobara
This is a photograph of Irene Gut Opdyke, taken shortly before her death in 2003. She was a Polish Catholic girl who had just started into nursing school when World War II started. The government of Israel listed her among the Righteous Gentiles for her bravery in helping Jewish captives escape from the death camps to freedom during the Holocaust. Her youth was interrupted by the violence and sexual trauma of being captured by the Germans and forced to do labor in the officers dining room and kitchen.
She was a victim in unspeakable ways but from the second story window of the mess hall where she worked, she could see into the Jewish ghetto where her former neighbors had it much worse than she did. She had seen, on several occasions, when the German soldiers would drive into the overcrowded camp and call all of the Jews to stand outside and they would reduce the overcrowding by shooting several of the prisoners . . . men, women, and children.
By the end of the war, she had become heroic in her brave and clever ways of getting Jews out of the camp to come help in the kitchen and mess hall and then finding ways to sneak them out and into the nearby forest where they could run away from certain death. But she didn’t start there.
In her autobiography, she describes how she helplessly witnessed the deprivations of the Jews in the camp, and the sight of starving children moved her to scrape some of the scraps from the officers’ plates into a little tin box that she would hide under the ghetto’s fence at night when she was taking out the garbage. Finding the box empty the next day, she would fill it up again and hide it at night. It was a small gesture, maybe as much to assuage her conscience as it was to feed starving children, but it was this practice that went on for months that built the courage in her to begin to take larger actions, to the point that she finally became a part of the armed resistance against Germany in guerilla warfare.
I suppose that we would all like to think that we would have done the same, if we had been around in those days but you should know that the truth is that most of her peers just went along with the Nazis. Conflicted with guilt about having agreed to be an officer’s mistress in exchange for his silent consent for the use of the basement in his house where she would gather escaping Jews before their nighttime flight into the forest, she went to a priest to confess her sins. Her priest admonished her for both her sexual sins and for what he regarded to be a sin, saving the Jews from extermination.
It was her choice to take the risks involved with compassionately saving some food to put in a tin box in the evenings that allowed her to become the hero we remember her for having been.
This is one of the most fundamental aspects of spirituality. You form a habit of compassion through the daily practice of small deeds until it becomes who you are, an automatic, unthinking reaction. This is a statement of the obvious: You learn to ride a bike by riding a bike; you learn to sing by singing; you learn to dance by dancing; you learn to love by loving, and you learn to instinctively act with compassion by practicing compassion in little ways every day.
This is my keyboard where I work every day. It is a wireless ergonomic keyboard (slightly curved with a bowed layout to make typing for long periods of time less of a strain on the lower back and shoulders). I have had several of these through the years. They last about five years before constant use coupled with spills of coffee or pasta sauce eventually ends its useful life.
If I were to ask you to point to the “e” key, or the “m” or “n” keys could you pick the right one? What about “l” or “s”? If I am trying to just pick any of those letters associated with keys now worn slick with use, I typically can’t remember what letter is which key. But when I position my hands over the keyboard and start to write, my fingers automatically go to the right key without any thinking about where the “e” or the “s” is. My fingers know by habit in the same way that a pianist is not saying the letters of the notes they are playing in their head. Years of practice makes the fingers know, through habit, which key plays which sound.
Ms. Bertrand, my high school typing teacher, would take points off of a test if she caught us looking at the keyboard. Now, if I were to look at the keyboard, I wouldn’t remember how to type.
I want to suggest that the practice of compassion or empathy or even “wokeness” is much the same. A lot of what we are asked to do to protect the planet or to care for the poor are, if you consider them closely, are just symbolic gestures. If you put your paper, plastic, aluminum, and glass into recycling bins, are you helping the environment? Well, not always. Much of what goes into recycling bins is transported by fossil fuel powered vehicles and sold to poor countries for them to “recycle” them and most of that just ends up in trash heaps or it is dumped into the ocean.
Only about a fourth of the plastics we recycle are ever actually repurposed. The majority of recycled paper and cardboard just end up in the landfill.
Aluminum has some small value, but we have a lot of paper, plastic, and glass and some of it can be used again, but most of it is just disposed of in a way that is much more harmful than if we just put them in the trash.
However, the practice of recycling increases our awareness of pollution, the depletion of resources, over packaging, dangerous waste management practices, and the need to conserve and reuse. Sorting your trash makes you think about what you are sending to the landfill, which makes you think about all of the manufacturing and government practices which are spoiling the earth, and if enough people become sufficiently aware and concerned, we can change.
For many years, we fed about 100 unhoused citizens in Springfield, one or two, and sometimes three, times a week. Did doing that solve the problem of hunger in our community? Did it address poverty? Obviously, it was helpful in the sense that some very poor people got to eat some decent, healthy food, but, you can argue that doing that creates a dependency on poverty programs while doing nothing to help people to get out of poverty. What those guys needed was not another ham and cheese sandwich but rather they needed job training, employment, housing, counseling. And addiction treatment. But we did give them a lot of ham and cheese sandwiches.
I was there two or three times a week. I got to know the names and stories of many of these unsheltered people. I knew some of their stories, and a bit about their addictions and criminal records. They became humans to me, not mere statistics, and the whole issue of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and the need for addiction and mental health care along with penal reform came to be more clearly in focus. This “symbolic” work was an education for me, and it affects how I live, how I vote, and which government programs I support and which ones I vehemently oppose.
I will confess to you that I go absolutely nuts when I see those TV ads for Shriners Children’s Hospitals or St. Jude’s Cancer Research Hospital. They parade out these cute hairless children who are fighting for their lives against cancer, or kids with prosthetic arms or legs offering to send you an adorable blanket to thank you for your gift towards buying the medical treatment and equipment that they need to just survive.
These kids are being hawked on the level of the abused puppies that Sara McLaughlin uses to absolutely ruin our day while she sings softly about angels.
These poor kids don’t need college sorority sisters to hold another bake sale for them, we need universal healthcare. When a kid has brain cancer and another kid doesn’t have any legs, this isn’t about insurance coverage or your willingness to send $10 a month to the Animal Shelter and another $10 to the Shriners Hospital, it is about being the kind of society that is unwilling for the children of the rich to get the best healthcare in the world and the children of the poor wait for someone to do a yard sale to buy them a wheel chair.
But to this date, in 2023, in the richest country of the world at the richest time in history, we still label any politician who advocates for universal healthcare in the United States as being “crazy.” Honestly, as Bono famously said, sometimes I just don’t have enough middle fingers to express how I feel about American politics.
And yet, as the Republican field of candidates for the 2024 nomination is growing, when you look under the hood, all you see is one flavor of fascist after another Nazi with fruit and nuts filling the horizon. So, as much as I hate them, I guess Americans still need TV ads for donations to St Jude’s and Shriners and probably even more images of freezing and starving puppies to try to kindle the dying embers of compassion into some kind of flame until we can actually find the character to start doing the right thing.
So sure, recycle your aluminum cans. Donate to a friend’s “gofundme” page to help with their lifesaving medical expenses, at least until America grows up to do what most developed countries in the world have already done, created universal healthcare for everyone, and aggressively started moving to clean, renewable energy sources, and stopped making single use, disposable plastic and paper products.
Mr. Wizard, give that tin man a heart, and give that scare crow a brain, and please, for the love of God, give American voters a conscience. And please don’t wait for me to sing “In the arms of the angels.”
