The last day of our trip to LA was very interesting as all other days were, but for the first time I started thinking about where all the non-profits fit into the big picture of how America is in the world. We welcome asylum seekers and refugees, but our foreign policies are the things that created them. We penalize other countries for human rights abuses as there are sexual assaults and rape in our own prisons. Human rights is something for international studies students, they don’t apply to us or the USA (oosah).
We all occupy this space together, the city, the state the country and this world. We all have to live with a certain amount of ambiguity in our lives. We sacrifice certain principles to be in a relationship with someone else, to have a job, to participate in the market economy. For some reason when the contrast hit me, that even the organisations that does the good work, that sings for their supper that endures financial insecurity to help others has to live in this world of strings and limitations was jolting. The realization that even the people who are heroes have some point in their lives done something shameful, embarrassing or something that goes against their values makes us HUMAN and not hypocrites.
It’s easy to criticize the non-profit world because they are the ones with the money, the vision and the structure to make wonderful, non-market based solutions happen for the most marginalized, the forgotten, the people who slipped through the cracks. As they circulate the fringes of the capitalist machine they endure scrutiny, oversight and constant questioning. Why do we feel the need to pressure, to criticize and to question them? The agro-medical pharmaceutical industry continues on its merry way, destroying the environment, health and then provided the synthetic band-aid pills to make people live a little longer so they can continue to feed the system through their consumption. But the organisations that work with gangs, the prisoners, the victims of violence and injustice are ones who get the scraps of the giant capitalist machine that we have build to exponentially grow and destroy everything that live in its path.
So that’s how i feel. We scrutinize the few while the massive machine continues to turn out the violence, build the violence into our lives. Isolates us from human connections. Channels the relationships in our lives through the capitalist relationship to goods we purchase, the media we consume.
