Feeling my giving impulses challenged

Charitable giving is core to who I am.  There are a clutch of issues which really motivate me, and those have included female reproductive rights, female education and access to education, child abuse, sexual harassment, animals and the natural world, and homelessness.  There is a common thread—helping those who are not able to help or protect themselves.

I volunteer, I serve officially, and I have always given money.  An ex-Domme even threatened to use my altruism to change my behaviour, knowing that it would have a huge impact on me.  Shame on even thinking that but thank goodness she never pushed further than simply wondering how to harness that motivation.

Where I live right now, there is an on-the-ground fundraising campaign to support a particular charity.  It helps drug addicts and other troubled men to get their lives in order, avoid the streets, and to become productive members of society. Sounds good, right?

I was accosted in the street by a man representing this charity who wanted me to sign a petition.  I am always happy to sign a petition for a worthy cause.  But as I was filling out my details, and listening to him talk about how he was no longer taking drugs, stealing, assaulting people, something didn’t feel right.  And when I didn’t pledge money, or give money, he got shirty.  

And I looked at him, and then at all of his “colleagues” who were stopping people all around us, and considered myself, a trans woman who is facing discrimination every day, even just from the way people look at me.  They were all white men.  Every damn one of them.

And I was thinking, ‘what?  I should be proud of you for just being able to not be a scourge on society?  You have all of the advantages.  You are a white man.  You want me to give money to you for doing the bare minimum?  What about people who face real adversity?  Do we even have to look very far today to see millions of people who have far more profound needs because their agency has been stolen?  Don’t come begging when you have all the tools at your disposal already’.

And I was actually angry at this man, this organisation, for being out and in my face.  And I don’t ever feel this way.  I spent a year working as a volunteer for a very high profile charity that deals a lot with people who fall through the cracks, and seemed in retrospect to be almost all young white men.

My feelings were confusing to me.  In a way, we should not have to face a triage decision in a modern society—that one person falling through the cracks has a need lesser than another.  But I couldn’t get away from the feeling that there are so many people, so many causes that matter more to me, that deal with people who have so much less to start with because of the “accident” of birth.  Where do you even begin?

But I only have so much to give.  Is it wrong of me to not want to help people who have such an advantage to start with and to focus on those who don’t?  The answer has to be ‘yes’, but it is hard to feel good about it.

The Dash

I read of a man who stood to speak at a funeral of a friend.  He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning…to the end.

He noted that first came the date of birth and spoke of the following date with tears but said what mattered most of all was the dash between those years.

For that dash represents all the time they spent alive on earth and now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth.

For it matters not, how much we own, the cars…the house…the cash.  What matters is how we lived and loved and how we spend our dash.

So, think about this long and hard; are there things you’d like to change?  For you never know how much time is left that still can be rearranged.

To be less quick to anger and show appreciation more and love the people in our lives like we’ve never loved before.

If we treat each other with respect and more often wear a smile…remembering that this special dash might only last a little while.

So, when your eulogy is being read, with your life’s actions to rehash, would you be proud of the things they say about how you lived your dash?

LINDA ELLIS

And as this poem so eloquently conveys, the only thing that matters is how we live our lives. All things are temporal. Worldly goods, humans, the world. Our purpose is to experience life, the truest and most complete expression of which is love. I am forced to ask myself this question: “does this action take me closer to love, yes or no?” And wrestling with that demon is the meaning of life, of growing, of changing, of being a source of love for those around you. Nothing else matters. Nothing at all.