“People Should Try It to See How Much Fun It Is”

Speaking of extra innings. I was visiting my dad in New York and saw in the paper that “The Seventh Seal” was going to be on TV after a ballgame. It’s a classic Ingmar Bergman movie about a character representing death who plays chess with a soldier who has returned from The Crusades. (Bergman later went on to make boring melodramas like Woody Allen.)

I was determined to see the movie and it was quite a test. The game lasted 22 innings. I stayed awake for both. It must be some kind of record. I only lasted 12 innings in the recent 18 inning World Series game.

A couple days later Dad drove me to Albany so I could be out of New York City to start hitching back to Oakland. That first day I only made it 95 miles to Utica. Like Otis on The Andy Griffith Show, the cops could have given me a room as a vagrant, but I chose the Salvation Army.

Being a California kid, I wasn’t accustomed to the dingy, sooty East. I was directed to one of many little beds in a big room that echoed with snoring, coughing old men, like I have become today. I wouldn’t make a good bum in Venice Beach or Hollywood littered with trash and needles. I should have appreciated the Utica Salvation Army more. Times have changed.

Anyway, I eventually made it home (if you can call it that) to Oakland. I loved hitchhiking. The people who picked me up wanted to. Only once, did someone try to rob me and I talked them out of it saying “The Man” was our common enemy.

Dawn’s dad used to say, “He knew he was walking when he started.” Utica was uncharted territory. It wasn’t like I'd suffered a house fire or earthquake, yet I sure appreciated the bed.

The other time I was helped by the Salvation Army was when I mistakenly went to Alaska in search of a logging job weeks before the logging season began. I made my way to Sitka and stayed out of the drizzling rain there for about a week until I was hired by Bud Brown Logging out of Rowan Bay.

Charity has various degrees of personal interaction. It can be anywhere from the unemployment “insurance” we farmers received in 1993 because of the incessant rain, (We never even paid a premium toward that so-called insurance.) to handing a panhandler a five dollar bill.

In the cases where the Salvation Army helped me, I was alone, yet someone knew that someone would need some help someday. The middleman worked.

Other forms of charity are overlooked as charities. When we go out to eat, I might give a big tip to a waitress who strives to do a good job. When ordering Chinese or Mexican food, I’ve opted for chicken over beef because beef doesn’t allow for much profit nowadays. We need to keep these people in business.

My Uncle Adrian brought a homeless man home to their spare bedroom. Fred lived with them until he got a job as a hotel doorman. This would be part of a voluntarist charity system whose key elements are generosity and gratitude. Thumbs up.

With government charity there is no connection between generosity and gratitude because a dictatorship confiscates and redistributes the help. There is no incentive to show your benefactors that their contributions made a long-term difference. Government charity has resulted in generational dependence and a society where fathers, churches, and community are replaced with a pool of wealth assumed to be owned by people who didn’t earn it. Without the support of this organically connected support, crime surges.

Rating services and the fact that many people donate because they see the results make the Salvation Army a good place to put your spare change if you don’t see the need somewhere else.

You may comment through a letter to the editor or directly to me at 4selfgovernment@gmail.com. You may volunteer to ring the bell through that same address.