newshound

VICTIM$

Charity is deeply rooted in the American Way. Charity as entitlement is relatively new, and strange.

Tsunami relief is not entitlement. It is the kind of good old-fashioned American charity that awes the rest of the planet and helps in world public opinion to offset our propensity to bomb people when we do not get our way.

9/11 and Katrina ushered in the charity-as-entitlement era.  It just was not enough to save lives and clean up the mess.  The victims, or their friends, relatives and significant others had to be paid off.  It was simply not sufficient to blame terrorists, or that ultimate terrorist Mother Nature, for the ill fortune.  Since somebody had to take the rap, it landed on all of us.

If terrorists or Mom Nature blows you away, you lose.  No benefits. But someone related to you, or somehow connected to you, is now entitled to get rich.

Who knows the full extent of what was given to those connected to 9/11 victims?  Who really challenged the notion that the “worth” of the actual victims (whatever that means) should exceed the lifetime earnings of the average American by several times? Don’t even try to calculate the money that was thrown and still is being thrown at Katrina victims as if it were an entitlement.  Just know that it is far more than it would have cost to gather up the entire place and put it up on dry ground.

Consider Virginia Tech. Some nut shoots a bunch of people.  The University does at least as well as 99% of us would have done to cope with such arbitrary terror out of the blue on some otherwise normal day.  Still, the victims (that is, people connected somehow to those actually shot) are entitled.  Families of the 32 dead, those physically injured, and those “psychologically traumatized” by being on the second floor of the wrong building (or right building, depending on your point of view) will be paid off.  Each will get $180,000 from charitable donations as well as all they and their lawyers can sue the taxpayers for. After all, the taxpayers, who maintain Virginia Tech for the benefit of these folks, must be guilty of something.

Charity is fine, and it does not even have to make sense. It is very American. So is feeling the pain of those who grieve.  Entitlement, on the other hand, should have to make sense.  What is evolving today is a particularly malignant offshoot of the politically correct – entitlement to a big payday for grief in the face of disaster.

This will sound churlish or unfeeling to those who simply must see a government solution to everything. Some insist on not just feeling the pain of those in grief but also on making that pain a public fiscal responsibility.

Those who think everything has a price support entitlement as compensation, or maybe as substitute, for grief.   Those who know better will understand that real grief in the face of loss is a personal thing and not a public burden.

Steve F. Kime

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