I wonder why people seem to be more “moved” to show up when it’s about bills than monthly groceries needs; it’s literally for food for a month. I wonder if people are quietly demanding others to perform hunger before moving to redistribute resources. It’s really sick if you have a conscience and a presence of mind to think about it.
#mutualaid #mutualaidspace #mutualaidrequest #fediverse #fedihelp #poverty #healthcare #solidarity @mutualaid @mutualaid
3 Comments
SacralPlexus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 31d
I don’t know if your observation can be universally generalized but I would guess that the short answer is that people may excessively use utilities through carelessness but the margin of error is small. Food however can have a wildly different budget from person to person and is much easier for the giver to feel taken advanatage of.
Example: If someone asks for $200 to pay their electric bill and I later find out that they run their AC cooler than I do, that’s maybe a little annoying but the difference it made in their bill is maybe 10-20%.
If someone asks for that same $200 for food, they may blow through that eating fast food for a couple of days instead of getting a cart of groceries that might have lasted two weeks. It is really easy to quickly waste a lot of money on low quality food. Here I as the giver am way more likely to be upset that my generosity was ‘wasted’ on needlessly expensive junk food instead of making an effort to stretch the funds responsibly (imo). I speak from experience.
The uncertainty that one scenario brings relative to the other is probably part of why people are hesitant to just pour cash into a situation where someone needs food.
mutualaidspace@mutualaidspace.org · 1 pts · 31d
@mutualaid @mutualaid
I still don’t get the hesitations, I genuinely can’t relate. Framing a $200 grocery request as a risk that someone will just blow it on fast food is a pretty harmful stereotype. For one, $200 is a very real, standard monthly grocery budget in much of the world, including here in Indonesia. But more importantly, when we hold onto the fear that poor people won’t stretch funds “responsibly,” we end up withholding help from people who are genuinely just trying to survive the month. Why would anyone police poor people’s performance of poverty as if there’s a manual for how to be poor correctly? Mutual aid asks us to let go of that need to control the recipient. Your response does explain the donor logic of charity well though, which is what mutual aid isn’t about.
SacralPlexus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 31d
Agree it’s probably a harmful stereotype, I simply gave that as an example because it was an experience I had that kind of left me feeling used when it became clear over time what was happening. In that situation it wasn’t that I had set out a desire to police that person’s behavior but after observing it for a long time I felt like I was simply sacrificing from my family’s needs to enable behavior I didn’t agree with. Maybe it’s not my place to judge but we are talking about money I worked for and a decision I have to make about how best to use it. In this situation I decided it was better to use it to help my parents rather than that person. But that’s just one experience that I was generalizing to say maybe this is a part of the answer to your question, idk.
These sorts of mental equations are often under the surface when people have to decide things in the moment and it’s not always a clear, explicit chain of thoughts that leads up to the decision to help in one scenario but not another.