HELP !

Help
I need somebody 

(Help) not just anybody

(Help) you know I need someone        (Help)

When I was younger, so much younger than today
(I never need) I never needed anybody’s help in any way
(Now) but now these days are gone (these days are gone) 

 I’m not so self-assured
(And now I find) now I find I’ve changed my mind

And opened up the doors

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down                           

And I do appreciate you being ’round
Help me get my feet back on the ground

Won’t you please, please help me?                       [The Beatles]

Yesterday there was a very heartfelt story about a Canadian helping to cook meals for central American migrants at the Mexico-USA border. This man’s story of helping hungry, desperate people was, of course, very touching and effectively moved my heart to want to also help in some way. And yet….. help is a 4 letter word, a dangerous word, a judgemental word, an emotional word that shuts down the intellect, for, of course, any moral and sensible person wants to “help”.

And yet… I have seen “help” backfire. I have seen the old adage “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” come true. I have seen, most obviously when we have tried to “help” a drug addict or alcoholic, that “help” is actually simply enabling – enabling destructive choices and destructive behaviours and thus actually, in the longer term, making the situation worse.

Perhaps it is having a longer term perspective that allow “help” to go from good intentions that don’t really help into long term, ie. Sustainable, ways of thinking and acting, that truly “help”: ie. The people involved in the desperate situation can stand on their own two feet in their own country without our “help”. Here is the old saying, which we all know, [and yet we don’t do it] that captures the essence of this REAL, authentic help.

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

What I see as “help” by many individuals is a kind of help which helps them more than those “helped”. How is that? Well, short term, band aid kids of help which just keep the misery going and keep it from becoming so bad that fundamental, long term changes are not made, allows the “helping” person feel good about what they do… while the problem never gets any better. It’s so strange, I too, like you, want to be a “good” person  who “helps” others… and yet, when I help in a way that is temporary at best – say, like I did yesterday – give some food to a lady standing at the street corner with a sign saying “Hungry, need food” – is that simply a form of enabling?

And yet…. The kind of help required to support for people like the central American migrants must be at a governmental level to be effective. So when governments are unwilling or unable to act people like the well meaning Canadian [or me giving food to the lady standing at the street corner] serving food at the Mexican-USA border step in because the desire to help those in need seems to be baked into our DNA. So, the real question is, how can we move our government and voters to spend their tax dollars to help those who DO NEED IT, to move from “band-aid” help to long-term/sustainable/stop the misery help? Clearly all the world’s Aid organizations know more about this than I do… and yet… we seem to be stuck like Gerbils running around on a wheel, doing things which we know will fundamentally change nothing. Look at Haiti and central America as a case in point. Look at our homeless disaster in Canada. What needs to change to stop the misery?

I don’t know anything about development work, but I have had experiences with drug addicts and alcoholics. My conclusion is that ALL OF US, you and me, rich countries like Canada and poor countries like Haiti, are all addicts – we are addicted to ways of seeing the world, addicted to easy choices, addicted to blaming others, addicted to the desire to keep things as they are – especially when we know our behaviours are not working. The only way I have seen long lasting, healing change happen is for the person [and you can extrapolate this to countries] hits rock bottom, when the choice is clearly life or death, when they can admit to themselves that they are the ultimate source of all their problems, that yes, injustices have been done to them, but that the blame game and the escape game does not improve their lives, that only when they accept that they have to make the choice to change and accept their role in their addiction… then, and only then, can the healing begin. Only then can another person “help”, in a way that can, slowly and gently, move them to take responsibility for their actions and their choices.

Here is another aspect to this question of “help” that really helps: the fact that help is intertwined with PITY. We “pity” the poor migrant refugee. We “pity” the people in Turkey who has suffered so much [avoidable] death and suffering the recent earthquake.  We pity the homeless.  And yet… if our “help” is interlaced with pity will our unconscious feelings of superiority make all our “help” backfire? Once again, I am no expert, but a German writer, Stefan Zweig, wrote a book about this that I read many years ago which began my awareness that “help” is dangerous and must only be done very carefully and with the full and equal engagement of whomever you are “helping”. If you find this thought of interest, I strongly recommend that you read this book:

The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Beware of Pity, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings.
Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of his barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host’s lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder, yet one that will go on to destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.

A final word from Einstein whose expression shown below was often used by a military friend of mine  and rounds out our understanding of how to best address our current predicaments as we seek to “help”.

To me we seem quite insane. Our “help” is insane in that we keep on doing “good” things, we keep on trying to be “good”, and yet nothing changes… in fact, it could be argued, things are getting worse. There are more homeless people. More opioid addicts. An increasing divide between the have and have nots. More GHG emissions each year. More pornography. More climate refugees. Etc. Etc. Etc.

So, yes, let’s help each other. But let’s use our heart AND our head as we do. Let’s not just feed a person, but give them, wherever they are in the world, the ability to create a place to live which they can proudly call home, whether that be central America or downtown Ottawa or in your neighbourhood – all of us will need the right kind of help sometime in our life. Only helping the right way, without pity, can we truly be called civilized and good and create a society which is sustainable in the deepest sense of the word.