I started raising money for certain causes in 2014, but in the Fall of 2016, I set out to alter my life and channel as much of my work and blog as I could to do some positive things. Readers who wanted to come along could embrace the idea of doing as much good as we could together.
And they did come along, and we have done a lot of good. They call themselves the Army Of Good. And they are good, a great antidote to the rage and contempt despoiling our wonderful country.
This idea – it was better to do good than argue about it – was an almost direct result of the Presidential Election. I have no interest in hating President Trump or the people who support him. I do not wish to join the left or the right, I prefer to think for myself.
I foresaw it would be a bitter and confrontational time for the country, and I didn’t wish to spend any significant amount of my life in argument and grievance and rage.
I began more intensely working with the Mansion as a powerful symbol of the needs of the aging, and on the refugees and immigrants in upstate New York, more embattled and persecuted and pressured than ever before.
It was, for me, a staggering success. We have raised many thousands of dollars (I don’t know exactly what the total is, it is close to $200,000. I have met some extraordinary people.
And I have learned so much about me and about what it means to try to do good
It’s been wonderful, but also, of course, bittersweet.
Helping people involves money, and if I’ve learned little else on this journey, it’s that money can be a poison, especially in America, where money is God to so many people.
If you want to know what God thinks of money, wrote Dorothy Parker, just look at the people he gave it to. Everyone wants to ride in the limo, said Oprah, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
I have always believed – Joseph Campbell said it first – that people who work only for money are just another kind of slave. I have never worked only for money, yet this work of the Army Of Good requires money, in an almost continuous stream.
The money stuff is hard.
There is really never enough of it to help everyone, or to help them as much as I would like or for as long.
Helping the refugees is especially difficult. They need so much and have so little that anything involving money is a highly charged, and often destructive, issue for them. I would pay the rent, but then, the electric bill was due. I would pay the electric bill, but then the car insurance was due. I would pay the car insurance, but then the Internet cable would be due, or the cell phone would be shut down.
I never had enough money really, and I was not comfortable asking for more and more money all of the time. The refugee and immigrant organizations and bureaucracies tended, for perfectly understandable reasons, to be paranoid and wary. They only wanted to collect money themselves, they didn’t want anyone else to collect money that didn’t go to them.
I always had the sense I was making RISSE uncomfortable, and that is because I was. So I went out on my own.
Money is always an emotional issue with the refugees, they are struggling so much, especially now.
They often – almost always – asked me for more, or asked if I had more I hadn’t passed along, or asked why I couldn’t keep raising money for them, their needs were so great. I wish I had a million dollars to hand out.
I found often that the help I was offering was sometimes enough, but often not nearly enough. I don’t blame these people for asking for money, they must have thought me a strangely mystical person showing up and writing checks and asking nothing in return.
I found myself-fund raising every day, and whenever money changed hands, there always seemed to be some trouble, confusion or envy.
This week, I raised some money to buy gift cards for the Mansion aides. I was stunned to see a raging firestorm of comments the next day. “Why doesn’t he use his own money?,” asked one woman on my blog comments, “why is he asking other people for money?”
I hope I never need her help in a hurricane.
Some aides from another elderly care facility were outraged. They called me all sorts of names.
Why give money to the Mansions aides, they demanded, why not to them? Why was I insulting and offending other health care aides by writing that Medicaid facility residents had less money than those in private care, and thus needed more help?
Wow, I thought, only in America in 2018 could someone be so cruelly attacked for trying to raise money to give gift cards to deserving health care aides or residents in need.
See what we have come to. I won’t let myself go there.
There are continuous complaints over money from people I don’t know or never hear from.
Why weren’t there more girls on the soccer team? Why wasn’t the girl’s basketball team playing yet? Why wasn’t I collecting money for the Risse school any longer? (FYI, because RISSE officials didn’t want me to.) Why was I writing less about the soccer team?
One woman wrote a long message about her outrage that I had decided to focus on scholarships for gifted refugee kids, and not school children in their classrooms. It was probably about my ego, she suggested helpfully.
This process is both rewarding and draining for me in many ways. I often give some of my own money, if I can’t raise enough. I don’t have a secretary, I have to keep track of everyone thing myself, and I keep meticulous track of everything.
The refugees lived nearly two hours from the farm, and I spent several days a week driving to Albany. I have a book to write, a blog to publish, and a farm to help run. It was wearing me down.
And then, there was me. I’m an author, not a non-profit agency. I want to stay being an author and I need to work to pay my own bills, I don’t have much money either.
But I absolutely intend to continue this work and keep it a primary focus of my life. This will require constant balance and re-adjustment and change on my part, especially when it comes to money. How much do I want to raise? How much do I want to ask for? Who should get it, and how much should they get?
It is a rare day that I don’t get a snarky note from someone suggesting I am using the money I raise to buy Iphones or wondering why I should be asking for money at all. People in America are so mistrustful, and I suppose with some good reason.
But social media is a viral transmitter of nastiness, as well as communications.
I am weary of trying to answer them, I generally don’t bother to try any more. There will always be another one in a day or so, and no one on social media ever says “I was wrong,” or “I’m sorry.” It’s too easy to be nasty or wrong from a distance, with an e-mail address in between you and your target.
No one ever suffered from being thoughtless or inaccurate on e-mail, Facebook or Twitter.
Some people get angry when the Mansion residents can’t or don’t answer their letters, they want to know if the residents have received them, why they haven’t answered? And what about the wood carver Maulidi, why haven’t we heard from him?
I have to answer them and say I can’t keep track of that, and shouldn’t. I can’t reveal people’s illnesses or personal problems. If there is something to say about them, I will say it.
There are no rewards for doing this work, not for me, not for you.
The only reward is in the satisfaction it gives me personally, and despite the continuing uproars about money, this work has been, along with Maria and the farm, one of the greatest gifts of my life.
This rudeness is a part of doing this work in our country today, you can either suck it up and move forward, or quit and run. I choose not to quite and run. Ever. And it must never embitter me.
The message of the Army Of Good is that people are good, and eager to do good, given a chance.
I am acquiring the hide of a dinosaur. Is that really a good thing?
Money is essential for all of us, but it is often a poison to many. And perhaps, to me.
That is why I document every purchase I make so stubbornly with words and photographs and will only help people willing to have their photos taken, so all of you can see them.
I love this work and will not abandon it. I will change it as necessary. And I don’t need anyone to sooth me or to offer solutions. That’s my job.
The soccer team, very close to my heart, needed more money than I could raise, and they found sponsors who could give them what they need. The new sponsors don’t want me writing about them. I am proud to have helped them get so far, we did well for them.
As I have written before, I decided to refocus my work. To scale down my own ambitions. To focus first on the Mansion residents, whose help occurs on a scale we all can afford and that is not oppressive or unrealistic.
Their needs are modest. I can meet them, with some help from the Army Of Good.
And I will continue to help individual refugees and immigrants with realistic goals. And ask for assistance when I need it.
In a sense, this work was too successful, it was wearing me out, and I feared asking for and taking too much money from the good and not especially wealthy people who have followed my work and my blog and who support both.
I want to continue my refugee work by helping gifted students get full scholarships to good schools. This work has begun with Sakler Moo, who, with our help, was admitted to the Albany Academy.
I have committed to helping him with his tuition for the next three years as well as this one I am also determined to respect his privacy by waiting to visit him or photograph him.
He needs space to adjust to his new reality. And I need several thousand more dollars to pay for his tuition next year.
In my life, I have in recent years sought to embrace what the Minister Frederick Lewis Donaldson preached in a sermon: The Seven Social Sins are:
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
That’s a platform I can try to follow, even if I often fail.
None of this is meant as a lament, but more as a release and a reminder. Money is not what is important, it is never really about money, not for me. I must never let that happen.
The spiritual author Henri Nouwen writes about what to do when you feel attacked on all sides by seemingly irresistible forces, waves that cover you and want to sweep you off of your feet.
Sometimes these waves consist of feeling feeling rejected or misunderstood,. Sometimes they consist of anger, resentment, even the desire for revenge, sometimes of self-pity and self rejection.
These waves, writes Nouwen, can make one feel like a powerless child abandoned by your parents, a feeling I know all too well.
I love his recommendation for dealing with these waves, now familiar to any person who works or writes or thinks in public, and braces for assault every single day.
When these attacks come, look up at whatever God you believe in, he writes.
Look at him or her and say “Lord, have mercy.”
Say it again and again and again, not anxious, but with the confidence that you are committed to doing the best than you can for as long as you can, and to understanding that the only human spirit you really must please is yourself.
