Bury the Dead, Feed the Living. Shoot the Experts and Put the Kids in Charge.

by Eileen McGuire-Mahony | 1:24 pm, January 25, 2010 | Comments Off

For the compassion-mongering professional care ‘n share bears, no crisis is too small or too large to be mismanaged.

Take, for instance, Haiti, where our fellow men are suffering extraordinarily.  The French, who are somewhat weak in the military area, have got ‘occupy’ and ‘aid’ conflated as they are accusing the Americans of using the earthquake as a pretext to take over the country.

The Italians have cut their lunch break short to snark at disaster responses without offering anything else.   Danny Glover paused in between not getting call-backs to opine that tectonic plates have feelings and were simply reacting to the failure of Copenhagen to accomplish anything beyond providing fodder for hungry pundits.

And glitterati heavy telethons lead to breathless columns speculating on which celebrities were playing doctor in the green room.

Reports are swirling of U.N. and Red Cross aide delegations idling at their bases while protocol points somewhere south of ‘minutiae’ and ‘drivel’ on the importance scale get hashed out.  Apparently, there is an art to distributing food to hungry people.  You can’t just do something, you see.  It’s got to be planned.

Enter Charlie Simpson.

Charlie is seven years old.  He lives in London and he likes to ride his bike.

When he heard about the Haitian crisis, he decided, sans benefit of a planning committee or a gaggle of preening stiff-necks in bespoke suits, to do something.

Charlie went on-line to announce his plans to ride his bike for Haitian relief, explaining that, “I want to make some money to buy food, water and tents for everyone in Haiti.”

His goal was to raise 500 pounds.   He rode five miles and is now sending over 120,000 pounds to people he may never meet.

This is a better than 24,000% improvement on what he planned to do and, because we know Danny Glover is reading this, we’ll point out that it is carbon neutral.

The stunning ability of individuals to move mountains is magical in its simple truth.  In this instance, it is poignant.

Too often, we fall for the nonsense of would-be despots telling us nothing great is possible without ‘organization’ and ‘planning’ – code words for control.  We act as if the simplest kindness demands salaried agitators who swallow every cent marked for aide and preparation on a time scale that guarantees help will come too late.

Why on earth must we belittle tragedy and crisis with behavior that says the moment is unworthy of our attention on its own?  By what logic do we feel that we’ve got to dress up the pain of dignified, moral creatures with our own squawking?

How, for crying on loud, have we made an art form of having food within a few yards of the starving masses and letting both man and bread rot while we deliberate?

Had Charlie only reached his goal of 500 pounds or been able to send less than that, his actions would be laudable beyond the power of human language.  Any money he raised was going to do good when humanity faces hell.  We can’t belittle small, isolated acts of grace without killing the root of why we care about each other and where our capability for helping each other, for creativity, for innovation comes from.

We don’t need government and idiotic herds of ‘international actors’ to direct our compassion for us.  While they compete for air time and talk as if decency only exists as some aggregate function of mobs, the truth is that our best is within us as individual creatures.

The seven-year old who figured this out has shamed the pros.

Charlie is still collecting if you’d like to send something.

And, Charlie, when you’re stateside, look us up.  On behalf of PPC’s board, we’ve got the first round.

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