It’s with charity in my heart that I tell you it’s day #5 of Resolution Week!

Rant

You know what gets my goat? Did you even know I had a goat?  I don’t so never mind.  You know what bugs me?  When people rant and rail against the big bad welfare recipient who buys malt liquor  and cigarettes with food stamps and drives a BMW and goes on vacations to Disney World.  It’s not really a specific violator but a generic description meant to enrage people that somehow they personally are getting ripped off because someone who doesn’t deserve something is getting it.  In other words, they are pissed off that life is unfair.  They have problems and are dealing with them, but in the meanwhile these low-lifes are living high on the hog and not facing their issues and it just pisses people off.

Heart

Part of me understands but a larger part of me sees it as a heart closing up tight.  It is the heart finding reasons to not love, to not give, to not have empathy or sympathy or understanding. Because in truth, the overwhelming vast majority of people who are on welfare, food stamps, some sort of government assistance are not in that fraudulent category.  But that doesn’t matter to the hardened heart.  They just think everyone should be able to do what they have done, make it as they have made it, behaved as they have behaved.  And that, along with them telling the fraud story to themselves again and again, give them the excuse to not care.  They don’t care because they have rationalized that those people don’t deserve care.    

Who Do You Know?

They wouldn’t be able to rationalize like that if they actually knew those people in need, but they don’t.  They might know a neighbor who is having a tough time and say, ‘ok, but that is a different story’.  They might be told by their pastor about a family at church that had a bad thing happen and they say, ‘ok, but that is a different story’. And they are right, it is a different story. It’s a real story.  But each and every person has a real story, even if they appear to meet some cliche.  

Charitable vs Irritable

The question is, Where is your heart?  Is your heart charitable or is it irritable?  You’ll be much happier, and so will those around you, if it’s charity you feel.  And that charitable heart will not allow people to do bad things any more than an irritable heart. It will just allow you to approach each person with love instead of judgment.

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Drawing by Marty Coleman

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Answer to yesterday’s trivia question:

Question: Who was the richest man to die on the Titanic and why was he on it?

Answer: John Jacob Astor.  He was on the ship because he had married an 18 year old girl after divorcing his wife, a scandal of immense proportions in the US at the time.  They had gone to Europe to escape the publicity and let the firestorm calm down. They returned when they learned his new wife was pregnant. She survived, he died.  She gave birth to John Astor IV a few months later.

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