>
>> I believe it's a matter of perspective. It depends a lot on the relative
>> emphasis one gives to the personal versus the social, or the individual
>> versus the collective. Caring for other people or animals in distress is, I
>> believe, a very personal thing. If you intrude the social or collective
>> into it, it becomes "depersonalized". If the collective then funds it, it
>> becomes even more so. Rules get written around what you can do, who should
>> be involved, and how much of it is allowable.
>>
>
>But if you are not able to do these personal things, but you would
>like them to be performed, than you should be able to rely on some
>agency you created with others and you control. Depending on church
>and charity - random luck - for the funding of this is not practical.
I agree completely. There has to be common programs, and a social safety
net, simply because while I'm concerned about the welfare of people far from
me, there is nothing I can do for them personally except to pay into
programs designed to help them. However, there is a balance between helping
and intruding. Helping is asking the individual or family what assistance
they might need and then working out how it might be provided. Intruding is
knowing what is best for them and applying one-size- (or concept) -fits-all
programming. Such programming is open to all kinds of abuse. There was a
case in Canada recently where social workers swooped into a community and
took all of the children they considered at risk away from their parents
simply because the particular government agency had been criticized for not
intervening fast enough in earlier cases. And we have a longstanding legacy
of similar intervention - amounting to the theft of children by the state -
in our Indian communities. In both cases, some of the children may have
been at risk, but surely not all of them. And in both cases, the community
itself would have taken effective action had it been given the time and help
to do so.
>The problem in Russia is not that people "forgot how to care",
>but that they haven't got the means to care. Same as in the UK,
>if mental patiens are "released to the community" without the funding
>of future specialist care for them, a new layer of the destitute is
>created.
I think it is a mix of the two things. The Russians I encountered had, if
anything, more means than the Brazilians, but I got the feeling that they
were so depressed by the crumbling of their social system them that they
simply couldn't cope. They had grown up with complete trust in the state,
which had now betrayed them. The Brazilians had never trusted the state
because it had never done anything for them. They knew that they had to
look after themselves and went about doing just that.
>I was nor aware of the generous social provisions in Brazil even in
>principle. How is the specialist healthcare, education etc. is funded
>for those church groups? Do they cover all the people that need help?
>My information is somewhat different.
The Brazilian state is very generous in principle. For example, kids can go
to very good universities free of charge, provided they have finished
regular schooling and can pass rigorous entrance exams. What typically
happens, though, is that they cannot afford to finish regular school (which
is also free, but which comes with many little hidden costs which poor
Brazilian parents find hard to meet) and find it very difficult to pass
rigorous entrance exams. So who goes to university? Why the children of
wealthy parents who can afford all of the hidden costs and the tutoring for
the entrance exams. It's not only in social fields that Brazil has a
government that pretends much but can do little. I read recently that, by
law, people living in the Amazon Basin are only supposed to clear 20 percent
of their land. They clear 100 percent anyhow and nobody stops them.
While Brazilians do help each other, they also get help from the outside.
Foreign churches contribute to programs in Brazilian churches, and rich
churches contribute to poor ones. I saw this happening among fundamentalist
Protestant churches. I don't know if the same thing goes on among Catholic
churches, but I suspect that it does.
Ed Weick
