Block that kind heart!

Guest blogger: Grouchy Dad

On one track, my wife and daughter listen to their generous natures; on another, Grouchy Dad reads economists arguing about the historical roots of Haitian poverty, the best near-term measures for relief and the long-term keys to development in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nations.

The tracks intersect this morning when I see the eldest daughter carrying a torso-sized package of toilet paper off to school for a Haitian relief drive. Along with toothpaste. Both items were specifically requested by the organizers of the drive. (And, to her credit, granola bars, which at least are a relatively compact form in which to transfer calories to a suffering population.)

Absent any information on the organizers of the Haitian-relief drive, the most charitable speculation I can manage is that one or more church groups in northeast Indiana, where Haiti is a frequent mission destination, are extending their experience with the usual poverty-stricken misery of Haiti into these most unusual circumstances.

"Apocalyptic" is about right to describe what's going on there now. U.S. troops can’t hand out enough prepackaged meals and bottled water to satisfy demand. Tens of thousands of Haitians are waiting for a ship that might take them to a less-devastated part of the island. Because there aren’t even enough tents available, homeless Haitians live beneath bedsheets suspended over their heads. The aftershock moved some hospitals to evacuate their injured patients into the open air. Even before the aftershock, hospitals didn’t have fuel for generators, oxygen -- not even morphine to take the edge off the agony of people whose limbs were crushed by falling buildings.

Given such appalling conditions, people who round up toilet paper and toothpaste for the disaster don’t seem to know what they’re doing. Tidily wiped butts and virtuous regimens of oral hygiene fall far behind water, food, shelter and basic medical supplies in Haitian priorities today. The generosity that moves people to collect toothpaste for a population in barely imaginable crisis is like the generosity of relatives who’ve given me countless sweaters I don’t wear and ties that gather dust: well-intentioned but wasteful.

Deciding how a small contribution for the benefit of Haitians can have the best effect requires some research. “Good Intentions are not Enough” is a good place to start.

Emerging New Year’s resolutions

I didn’t make any official New Year’s resolutions this year, but as January wears on I find some emerging. I guess that’s better than the usual pattern, whereby I would’ve already abandoned my good intentions by now.

The first one is this: Buying all my clothes at Goodwill or Salvation Army this year. (I would make an exception for socks and undergarments). I haven’t actually taken any action on this yet, but then neither have I broken this unspoken resolution. I just haven’t bought any clothes, period. But it seems like a workable and interesting experiment. So we’ll see.

The second emerging resolution has to do with a project I call the grocery holding company. The basic idea was to set aside some money to buy extremely discounted groceries, hold onto them until needed, and then pay the “holding company” a price that allowed it to make a profit, yet saved us money on our family’s grocery budget. I’ve been experimenting with this for over a year now, and it’s proved trickier than I expected. But I’m intrigued to see if we could fund some of our limited and inexpensive weekend getaways with this enterprise. Again, we’ll see.

Finally, in my ongoing attempt to develop a generous nature I apparently wasn’t born with, I’m working on how I contribute time as well as money. Up until reading “The Power of Flow,” by Harlene Belitz and Meg Lundstrom, I had been feeling pretty good about ramping up our charitable giving last year despite pay cuts and increased costs elsewhere in the budget. But then I picked up this book, which informed me that if you really want to get in on the generosity feedback loop that seems to be built into the physics of the universe, you’ve got to give up your time as well as your money.

This really made me wince, because I’m not really a people person. Most days I would rather read a book than have a conversation with almost anyone, even people I like and love. But it’s with this in mind that I consented to accompany my mom to Weight Watchers this week. (Which is actually an example of being generous with both time and money, since we can’t really afford it.)

Naturally I can’t help wondering: How do I get my $40 monthly fee back from the universal feedback loop? If I quit overeating, we would save that much money on our grocery bill? I guess it’s possible. A worthwhile experiment -- more worthwhile than trying to boil eggs in a dishwasher, anyway.

The generosity generator

Lately I’ve been reflecting on our daughter’s generosity, and wondering if that’s a trait that skipped a generation, the way my grandmother’s Depression era thriftiness seemed to pass right over my mother before showing up in me.

On a recent family vacation, Rowan, 16, spent the souvenir money I gave her on gifts for a favorite teacher and her boyfriend. A few days later, she took food to a friend who, despite being sick, was pining for Taco Bell. A 79-cent order of triple-layer nachos would have sufficed -- this was, in fact, my hard-hearted counsel -- but she tacked on a Mountain Dew and cheesy fiesta potatoes, spending $3 of her $5 spending money for the week.

I can’t help wincing when I consider that on the same family trip, I was secretly glad we didn’t use the provisions I brought for a chicken-and-noodle dinner, knowing I could use them for a meal back home the next week. Whereas my sister-in-law would’ve been disappointed if we hadn’t used the dyed-black pasta and almost-orange alfredo sauce for our Halloween dinner. She, too, is more generous than I am, it would seem.

Not being naturally endowed with the sharing gene, I’ve had to construct an artificial mechanism for funneling a portion of our resources toward the welfare of other people and institutions. It’s been in action for five years now, and it’s worked remarkably well, neutralizing the irritation I used to feel when hit up for a donation and alleviating the anxiety that came with writing a check to those causes that we really did want to support. (Living just above the reduced-lunch income level for 15 years makes you hyper aware of every penny that goes out.)

Our charity fund is little more than a sudivision inside our savings account. We dump a portion of each paycheck into that cul-de-sac, and even though we’re still not up to 10 percent, it really adds up over time. Thanks to the magic of online banking, we just slide the appropriate amount over to the checking account every time we want to make a donation.

So, are we in fact being more generous, or are we just more aware of our generosity now that it can be documented?

The most obvious change in our charitable giving the past five years is that we’ve added monthly donations to the Unitarian church we periodically attend. Before 2004 we weren’t churchgoers, other than an occasional appearance (and small bill tossed in the collection plate) at the church I grew up in and my parents still attend. We don’t give as much as more traditional churchgoers probably do, just 1-2 percent, but that in itself probably matches and maybe even trumps an entire year’s worth of giving before we started tracking (and funding) this budget category.

A couple of other change indicators: We’ve cracked the triple digits in our annual giving to public radio, and now give five times as much to the American Cancer Society -- a development closely tied to my father’s bout with nonHodgkins lymphoma a couple of years ago. (Even as I write this, I wonder whether we should be giving more; can you put a price tag on your gratitude when a family member survives cancer?)

The real life-changing example that I always associate with the success of our charity fund, though, has to be the chicken dinner tickets my son’s baseball league sells.

This isn’t one of those slick yuppie travel teams, but a small town sandlot operation. Every year they ask the kids to sell 10 tickets. I was about to type, “I can’t tell you how much I hate this,” but in fact I can: I hate selling things, I hate making my kids sell things, even to relatives, we live out in the country so door-to-door sales aren’t an option, and on top of all that, only one out of the six of us even likes chicken on the bone.

Imagine my relief when our charity fund, emulating the holographic doctor on “Star Trek: Voyager,” tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Pardon me, ma’am, this looks like a job for Generosity Man.”

We used that account to buy the suggested $50 worth of tickets, then donated them to a food bank. One giant burden removed, two good causes supported.

All thanks to the artificial generosity generator we call our charity fund.