[Editor's Note: It took a lot of internal debate and conferring with family and friends on whether or not I should write this article. Please forgive me if it comes out non-linear and unfocused (well, more so than the stuff I usually write about) - I just can't figure out how to get all the thoughts out there in an order that makes for a smooth read. Maybe the disjointed, clunky, and often self-contradictory nature of this post can be seen as a metaphor for how this whole experience has left me feeling.
Sure. Let's go with that.]
This holiday season I volunteered to help out with the Salvation Army's Angel Tree program.
If you are not familiar with it, here it is in a nutshell. Needy families apply at the Salvation Army for Christmastime aid. If they are below a certain income/expenditure ratio they qualify to have their children receive items through this and an associated effort, Toys for Tots. As the name implies, Toys for Tots is (mainly) toy-based but the Angel Tree program is more focused on clothes, although there is a little overlap there.
New, unwrapped toys are donated to the Toys for Tots program and don't go to a particular child. Under the Angel Tree program, numerically-coded tags like the one shown on the left are labeled with a needy child's first name, age, gender, shirt, pant, and shoe sizes. These tags are then hung on Christmas trees at participating locations - usually malls or big box stores - around the region, where people can pick one, then buy some stuff that fits the criteria on the card. At that point they can deliver the stuff to the SA directly or sometimes back to the tree where they picked up the card. Sometimes businesses can request a certain number of cards be set aside for pickup and a central coordinating person distributes the cards as they are requested.
As Christmastime approaches, the families that applied for aid are notified of where and when to show up to get their clothes, toys, books, and games. By its very nature, the Angel Tree program is more uncertain than Toys for Tots since a tag may or may not be picked, it may or may not be lost, it might be picked and simply forgotten about, etc. In any case, if a bag of clothes gets returned along with the tag before the submission deadline, the parents are notified that clothes are there for them to pick up, too.
A little history on my part. As a kid, I had been on the receiving end of charities like this, although not this one in particular. Church handouts, government assistance - stuff like that. The why's and wherefores aren't important, and it wasn't all that horrible. As with most kids I wasn't really plugged in to the family finances, but even as I look back I can't justify the logic of having had both cable TV and government cheese in the same house.
The point is I now choose to do some volunteer work now and then to close the karmic loop a little and to show my three-year-old son that no man is an island.
I have no illusion about the role "dumb luck" plays in the events in someone's life, for better or for worse. I mean, sure, we are all the sum total of the key decisions we make, but each of these decisions is tied to the next by the most tenuous, gossamer thread imaginable. If you were to go back and give any one of these threads the tiniest of pulls you would yank everything out of alignment in a nearly random fashion and the whole thing would come crashing down around your ears.
But the most frightening part of that is that you don't get to control these threads holding life's events together. Hell, most of the time you don't even get to know they are even there until you look back over your life and appreciate how ridiculously improbable the particular sequence of events that have led up to build Now-You actually is.
I will go as far as to say I can convince myself that I would literally not have anything I have now (most importantly my wonderful wife and child) if it weren't for the fact my sister and a friend of hers intentionally left an unsmoked cigarette in an ashtray twenty some odd years ago. I chose to smoke it (my first cigarette, it was) and here I am today, writing this paragraph. The chain goes something like: if I left it be, I would not have had anything in common with certain high-school friends, I would never have been convinced to join the military, I never would have gotten the G.I. Bill, moved to the area, met my wife-to-be, etc, etc.
So, yes, I understand and appreciate "dumb luck".
However, to those unaccustomed to hard work and the making of measured decisions and who instead prefer to wear inertia around like a comfortable pair of well-worn sneakers, the achievements of others through their efforts can be dismissed as "luck", too. Not only does this provide those folks with a certain amount of comfort for making horrible choices (it's not their fault, after all), it also gives them a reason to never make new choices at all (because success is only achievable to those who have been helped or are lucky).
You have to admit that this is an excellent survival strategy but it only works in the long term if others are around to pick up the slack.
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