November 29, 2007 -- This is the season when the toy ads for children begin to outnumber the ads for erectile dysfunction, a/k/a The Only Toy Most Hippies Will Ever Need...and it is also the time when, after you have heard the fifteenth iteration of GOTTAHAVIT from one of the kids, you are ready for the standard lecture on being thankful for what you have, not to mention all the kids who have less than they have, and so forth.

You should in point of fact have been having this discussion with your kids since they were old enough to say Gimmee.  But many parents don't know how to discuss charity and charitable acts with their children, either because they are not by nature charitable people (believing with Scrooge that their taxes are high enough and anybody needy ought to apply to TheGovernment for relief), or because they view charity as a tax deduction and never actually meet poor people face to face.  A recent column on Town Hall suggested that you discuss charity with your children purely from the financial point of view, i.e. helping them create a budget for giving, starting a foundation and allowing the children to help in the allocation of funds, blah blah blah.  Do you notice anything missing from this discussion?

Right.  What about those people who are GETTING this swag?

Have your children ever come face to face with an honest to God Poor Person -- or anyone else needing charity?  If you asked your child what "charity" is, what would he say?

Of course, in order to bring your chlid face to face with the recipients of their charity, you the parent(s) have to walk the walk. There are plenty of charities out there that can use your assistance, and in every one of them you come face to face with the people you are there to help.  From the time your child is old enough to toddle, he ought to be going with you on your charitable rounds.  Don't assume he won't understand what's going on.  He will.  He will also, you had better be warned, repeat what he has heard you say, even if you did not know he was listening.  "Are you a beggar?" "My daddy says you should get up off your fat [bleep] and get a job" or "How can you be poor when you're so fat?" for example.  Nothing moderates one's speech quicker than hearing it coming out of the mouth of your little angel in a room full of those you came to help! If your little parrot is prone to this kind of candour, better leave him home til he reaches the age of reason.  Or until you do.

Okay, assuming you have passed this hurdle, then take your child with you when you do your charitable work.  Zack was always very sensitive to the feelings and needs of others from the time he was two; we could not let him watch those commercials for starving children in Africa because he would become hysterical with the need to do something right now.  I took him with me to the Day Shelter, where mothers who work nights could get some rest while their children were cared for, and his first question was "Why don't they have any toys?"  I explained that they couldn't have a lot of toys because they had nowhere to keep them; most of these children were homeless.  He had never realized that homelessness could affect children, until that day.  When we got home he gathered up a big box of his toys, crayons and paper, and asked if we could take them to the children.  They were his to do with as he wished, I told him, and I let him give them away -- cautioning him not to mention that the children were homeless because it might hurt their feelings.  He decided to say, "I thought you might like to have this," and it worked fine.  (When he got older we had a yard sale in which the boys sold their own stuff and took the money to buy stuff for the kids in the shelter.)

Steven was and remains (now at age 21) an obliviot.  One morning he was in full whine mode about some toy or other that everyone in the universe had except him, and what a mean awful person I was because I would not buy him whatever it was.  I told him to hush, and took him with me to Ronald McDonald House where I worked in the kitchen on weekends.  There he got the shock of his young life (he was about 8 at the time), when he saw children who were terriblly crippled or fatally ill, and yet were much less cranky than he was.  He thought it over for a few minutes and then asked if he could "Play with the children" while I did my work, and I told him to go ahead.  He went to the playroom and asked if they'd like to play, and spent the two hours picking up things they dropped, retrieving balls that they threw, talking about kid stuff and generally hanging out.  To my surprise and his own, he was quite popular.  Kid-to-kid chat is blunt and plain spoken, anyway, and they didn't mind his asking how they got hurt or what was wrong, and he didn't mind following their lead in playing.  He was pretty quiet on the way home, until suddenly he started listing aloud all the things he was thankful for, including "cats to pet" and his bunk bed.  Somehow whatever toy that was his obsession in the morning had dimmed to nothing in the face of the knowledge that he had two arms and two legs that allowed him to climb into a bunk bed, and other kids didn't.

Your child may have different talents or interest. Some kids do very well visiting nursing homes or the VA; my nephew loves to sit and listen to soldiers tell stories about life at war, and one of my sisters writes letters for people in nursing homes and has always brought her children along with her.  (The kids, now grown with their own kids, used to brag that they had "a hundred Grammans and Grandpas!") Or he might want to give money to a street person.  If it is his own money, let him give it away, even if you don't give money to beggars.

The point is to teach them about charitable giving by letting them see the people who need their help, and letting them do as the Good Samaritan did: give the help needed for the problem at hand, and then move on.  If you do a good job when they are little, then you can discuss foundations and planned giving and all that stuff when they are old enough to work or when they have money of their own to control.

I urge you to start, though, not with talk of finances and cash, but by showing them the face of the poor and needy.  And do not send them to practice charity.  Take them.

November 7, 2007 -- Briefly last week appeared a story about a very small town (145) in Tennessee that only has 3 hours of water per day, which they have trucked in and which is turned on and off by their mayor.  The stories about this group of sad folk disappeared very quickly, as their efforts to live on 3 hours of water per night were revealed to be quite a bit short of Heroic.

As the water flowed at 6:00 p.m. each night, the story related, the townspeople turned on their dishwashers.  Stop me if I am wrong here, but if your town is perishing for lack of water, wouldn't washing the dishes in a dishpan be a more rational use of a scarce resource?  After all, the water in the dishpan could then be emptied onto the garden or used to flush the commode, couldn't it?

Same thing with the townfolk who leap to run the daily washing machine load.  In days of yore, people had two or three outfits, one off, one on, and one to sleep in.  These outfits were hand washed in a tub and dried in the air.  For those kids who can't get the idea of wearing clothes more than once before tossing them in the hamper, a turn at the washtub would soon change their thinking.  Again, the water in the tub can be used to water the garden or swish out the commode when done with its primary use.

It was also mentioned that everybody jumped into the shower (individually, one would assume, although the Sixties had another suggestion in that regard).  Now, in the Fifties when all those Mental Hygiene movies came out that we got to see at school, we were told that it was necessary to bathe or shower once a week.  People of the Fifties were on balance much cleaner than people of the Sixties and Seventies, as I remember, for all they did not shower every day.  And being one of those who arrives at the campgrounds at Le Mans on Sunday afternoon when the shower block does not open until Wednesday morning, I am very much aware of just exactly how much washing can be done in a bucket -- washing my hair first of course, to keep the cooties away, then using the bucket of water to swirl out the commode.  There is no earthly reason why a town full of people who have to live on a truckload of water a day should be wasting so much of it in the shower.

Finally, it was mentioned that so greedy and wasteful is this little town that frequently the water runs out before the three hours are up -- leaving the laundry and the dishwasher halfway through their cycle and the teenagers covered with lather.  What lesson do you suppose they learn from that?  Why, start sooner!  Get Yours before your neighbours Grab It All!

If this group of modern-day Survivors had ever been taught how to save water the old fashioned way, they could probably have water all day long from that one tankload.  As it is, they are only serving as an example of how hopelessly anti-survival modern ideas of "need" really are.