After the drop, we cruised back, past "JR's good Time Saloon". Jeez- how - American. We had avoided this little brasserie, even though we passed it several times a day. Who wants to come all the way to Paris, only to hang at a place whose very name was a cliché' from American television? But today we decided to give it a try.
As is usually the case, with prejudice, we were soon proved wrong, and JR's became a haven for us- a home away from home- an almost perfect halfway house for an expatriate family. But it had its ---rough edges.
Robert, the owner's son,  hated bums. He and his hard-rocks mother would pour a cup of--contempt--  for those who would attempt to cadge a bit of money, or sell a rose. Robert's rap was at least relatively original-- he would speak of the beggar's mafia- the bag man who remained forever invisible, but who he was convinced would come around every hour or two to collect the take from the beggars, and drive off in a Mercedes. As if this further robbery could somehow make them even more unworthy. He claimed passionately that it was not his job to take care of the homeless, that the State should do that, that half of them were frauds anyway, and they smelled bad. Like pigeons, they just cluttered up the city.

Yet-- after the morning rush was over, the place would be empty for an hour or two.  Robert would crush up a stale baguette. If no one was looking, --particularly mom-- he would sneak the crumbs out the door for the one-footed pigeon who was a daily visitor, and who would frantically gorge on the bonanza of baguette.
Crumbs-- for the "airborne rats", he called them, -but the boot for the beggars. Hm.

My wife's nephew was coming to visit. Bright and well cared for, at 16 he was the coldest thing in town- he made Robert look like a philanthropist. We collected him at gare du Nord, and the usual Eastern European gypsies and beggars descended on us, with their sometimes fraudulent stories and perhaps wooden babies wrapped in shawls. His disgust was palpable, he seemed affronted, befouled. I was taken aback. Oughta introduce him to Robert, I thought.
We gave them a bit of money, for which they were typically ungrateful. He was scandalized. "Why did you do that?" he asked incredulously, before we were even out of the station. "They were probably fakes."
I wanted his visit to go well, and tried to avoid the whole issue, except to say, "But what if they weren't?" His patronizing contempt was palpable.
"Don't the French have a place for people like that?"

But as my girls grew, and as the issue of kindness, of the crucial ability to "take the other" began to emerge, I pondered how to teach them the central, obvious thing that both Robert and Amir could not see- the central ability that makes us human.

He needs.
I have.
I give.

Simple.
Yes, the French do have places for "those people", and the quality of the culture can be read from those places, --for "those people". That's in part why I am here, and no longer in the United States. And -yes, some of "those people" don't want to go there-- they keep dogs to protect them from "those places", they band together in their tents from Physicians Without Borders, and resist the programs. Perhaps they know something that I do not. Certainly, they know things I don't. Things I don't, in fact, want to know.

But I know things that many here on ET do not-- or choose to forget.

That bell curve is convenient--and easy to put away when it seems to press for inconvenient action, the perfect shield to use to intellectualize what should be felt. But it applies to intelligence, to the  proclivity to have schizophrenia, to social and employment success. Poisson distribution, scatterplot, --all very convenient tools. Or emotional teflon.

If we slip, and allow ourselves to feel- they tell us that the guy in the sleeping bag on the bridge did not ask to be stupid or schizophrenic, that the disaster victims are distributed downwind of the site like irritating little artillery shells landing in our neat landscape,  that our cancer rates correlate powerfully with our use of industrial organic toxins--and not lifestyles.

Victims by no action of their own.
But--no crime here.  Only victims.

But what if these "victims" really do bear some responsibility for their own plight? Ah, the "market theology", the libertarian nightmare.

Man is eternally damned, sinful and depraved, and it is only through the intercession of Jesus that good can emerge. We can't do it ourselves-- we gotta have HIS help.

Do you believe that?

What utter nonsense. What barbaric bullshit. I thought we were past this crap.

The superb medical safety system that exists in France, and that is the envy of the world exists because of the impulse- the NEED to care. Directly and personally. The willingness to make direct, personal sacrifices-- to pay a lot of tax money-- so the victims of the curve, even those whose predicament is a result of their own mistakes-- get some slack. It exists because people demanded that a state bureaucracy be created to take their money away in great gouts, and to redistribute it to -sick people.

No one is ever an accident victim---before.

No one is ever sick---before.

To suggest that an imperfectly aimed Soros program  or a poorly administered Bill Gates foundation can be used as a personal justification for ---doing nothing-- is to rely on , ONCE AGAIN, the Deus Ex Machina, the church---God--- to fix it for us.  God's safety net. Or the Market.
Again.
How did the  social safety net come into existence?
That medical program that gives me prostheses and training for my legs exists because at some time or other, a bunch of people took it as THEIR JOB to care.
I think Robert is defending himself-- against the best part of himself.
I think my young nephew, fresh off the jet and in Paris, walkman in hand and money in pocket, without a speck of kindness for those fresh off the bus from Romania, is a pathetic victim himself. He and Robert are alone- atomized, powerless. They have allowed themselves to be disconnected from the very feelings that make a better world possible, --that lead to action. A better life, without the intervention of the great authority figure from the sky-- or from the Elysee Palace or White House. They have become living proof of the recurring evil of all the religious, authoritarian self-deceptive crap that I have fought against most of my life, and I resent them deeply.  

Doctors without Borders (and other charities) is the goad that gets the state off the dime--the proof that it is politically profitable to act, that gains can be made with the issue of human suffering--because people care.

Acts of random kindness- sacrifice- in the aggregate, testify to the power of caring, and make the rest happen. Without such acts from us, the state has no motivation whatsoever to act in a compassionate way, because it has no evidence of the emotional power of the issue.
The alternative is to be once again sucked up into the same old authoritarian (but hugely convenient) nonsense of-----

Not my job.  

Remember, like a corporation, the State has no feelings. It cannot "take the other", it is incapable of empathy and compassion. It's behavior is simply psychotic. One deals with a psychopathic personality by managing the discourse into areas where the other is not incapacitated, and it is perfectly legitimate to learn to manage the state or corporation by the rules of psychopathology. Like God, ---we made them in our own image. We can damned well make them behave better. But we can never, ever, make them FEEL.

WE must do that.