Annex to the Order

Charity Governance:

In response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, President Bush issued an Executive Order
(September 21, 2001), providing, among other things, that every United States person is prohibited from making or receiving any contributions of funds, goods, or services to benefit of those persons listed on the Annex to the order
[this is a brochure and it may not be current, but it will provide you with some sense of the difficulty facing charities].

Apparently some tsunami relief organizations may run afoul of this order.

Comments

[Ajax Bucky]

Better that bad things happen than that bad things happen, is it not so? Ranking bad things by order of how okay it is that they happen compared to other bad things that are not as okay to happen. So stiffing the chairtable enterprise so that money doesn't fall into the wrong hands is better than risking that it does. It's easier to figure out when you have a lot of money to start with but even then it can be confusing. For instance blowing people up to save them is pretty hard to get your mind around, and then it isn't, because saving them comes after they get blown up. Tsunami ghosts rafting toward heaven so that's okay. Sufferiung enlightens the left-behinds.
Blown-up Iraqi mother and child ghosts piecing themselves back together in loving gestures of puzzle-solving, then walking calmly away from this world and into the next. And again the left-behinds get to work in the rubble and the smells which is very cathartic and soul-cleansing.
How you have to see it is it's okay, you have to start with that, it's okay, then work toward why. It's okay to make up rules and stories because you serve that higher thing and it's okay, it all works out in the long run, because you believe.
Pretty much everything's okay as long as evil fat people get to keep their money and privileges.

[Phil]

What givers would say (to me, often, and you now) is, "You catch more flies with honey that with vinegar." What we end up with that way is a culture of flattery, not unlike sales or the courtiers of old. A few masochistic donors may relish self-flagellation, a select few might relish being flagellated by you or me, but generally an ego massage works best - though to say that it seems to me is really the ultimate insult. The Courter talking about how to con the King. May their always be room for Jesters, Fools, and Prophets cryig in the desert, or out of dumpsters and exhausted wells.

[Harry]

If it's flies you're after, death and feces will get more than any amount of honey.

There's a sad desperation to so much of charity and the most hopeful givers, the ones funding ordered liberty hothouse thinkers, strike me as the most desperate of all. What if being evil and greedy is actually a bad thing, and their success a contravention of Natural Law?

[Phil]

Of course, we fell from Eden into work, it is God's punishment, the market is, not His reward.

[Ajax Bucky]

How much of charitable giving is an attempt to redress the unfairness of something? Nature on one hand - the tsunami's cruel fist come smashing down; the status quo ante social order on the other - millions starving in 1930's U.S., hundreds dying on the streets of northern cities while crops were burned and goods withehld to drive up prices and keep the profit numbers above the producer/owners range of discomfort.
The consciencious objector as medic on the front lines. You can't escape the accusation of aiding the war by being there, but at the same time by cleaning up and healing, by aiding the fallen, you do go some distance toward redirecting the atrocity toward another way of being and doing, you lessen the damage, which is what's wrong to begin with isn't it?
But feeding the starving poor under the boot of a fascist economy drains rage from the heart of the violated doesn't it? Making the slave quarters comfortable and humane eh? Shortening the hours they can be forced to labor, though they still labor unrewarded.
It's a perspective issue I think as much as anything - when we talk as gods we need that Olympian vista, tiny people and their insignificant cries; when we talk as Franciscans we need the smell of the street unfiltered by the camera's sanitizing disconnect.
Both are real, important, necessary - clarification of intent, p.o.v., what is the greatest need? Or where can we be of the greatest use? Not the same answer, nor the same question.
So easy to speak to, so hard to work with - under the dull unblinking gaze of the eunuch-overseers.
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Flies Harry, yes, great rejoinder. And Phil Tutor - your work will be mentioned on distant worlds, in other timescapes, long from now.