Gift Giving: Useless, Meaningful, Inane, Ethical considerations
This seemingly simple concept has never been simple to me. From the earliest age I had misgivings about gift giving. I used to stay awake almost all Christmas night anxious about opening gifts the next day. Of course I outgrew that, and while I still enjoyed the gifts there was some disappointment that I didn’t get any gift that would make by neighborhood friends reek with jealousy. It was many years into adulthood before I realized my parents did that on purpose. My father was never into grandstanding anyone about anything, let alone put pressure on parents that maybe couldn’t afford to compete with a certain gift to their own kid. My dad would have most certainly said “What for? There is no need for him to have something better than his friends.”
I had an Aunt and Uncle who I never met, on my father’s side of the family, who sent me a Christmas gift every year. I couldn’t understand why they would do this. I hated being forced to write a thank you note to them for the gift. They did not know me at all and therefore the odds were great the gift was not anything I really valued. I suppose they did it to keep in the good graces of my dad. But since they never visited each other it puzzled me as to what good graces there were to keep. I don’t think they ever communicated with my parents by phone or letter either. I don’t remember when the gifts stopped. Probably they died and the gifts stopped. So inane.
At some point I began to realize most gifts I got from those other than my parents were more often than not, not especially what I would have bought for myself. To be fair to myself here, I also hated buying others a gift since I was not good at judging what they might really like and knew I would screw it up some way—wrong size, wrong color, wrong model, wrong kind of gift, whatever. Gift giving can be very wasteful much of the time.
It was probably in my late teens when I rebelled against family exchange of gifts on birthdays and Christmas. Each would declare what they wanted, and I guess the object was to get them what they wanted and not under-do or over-do the value of a gift they would be giving me. Sometimes one gift giver would surprise the gift receiver by getting them something other than what asked for. “Oh Reid, we saw this and just couldn’t resist buying this for you. It is so you”. Chances are my thoughts were: “If you liked it so much why didn’t you buy it for yourself instead of dumping it on me.” I know, bad attitude. I really hated this nonsense of “you buy me this and I will buy you what you want dollar for dollar”. Compulsory gift giving to those who were in no need of a gift was a botheration. It was senseless. It is even worse if each person is to take a stab at what the other person would like. Nothing was more frustrating to me than trying to figure out what someone else wanted, let alone which of the many choices regarding that something I should purchase. I really wanted them to like it but knew the odds of it not being exactly the right selection were great. Most of the time we never knew someone didn’t like it. Politeness dictated they fake it. Once somebody asked my mother what I would really like for a gift. She told them a “Louvin Brother album but good luck with that since he already has every one of them. If it is not really expensive and Reid really wants something, he already has it. Anything else he might want is unpredictable. Good luck.” I doubt it surprised anyone in my family when I announced that from here on out I was not accepting any gifts from family at Christmas, or on my birthday, and I was not buying anyone else a Christmas or birthday gift. And I stuck to it. It seemed to me that most gift giving was no true barometer of any relationship. My father reacted, when pressed, with his usual Solomon-like observation: “Maybe he is just more sensible than the rest of us. He is doing no harm.”
Actually, I will credit my young neighborhood friends for this sanity. We were all close, hung out together incessantly, and yet we never bought each other gifts. It went to the other extreme—like a battle of the ages as to who got the extra slice of pizza. Probably World War III would have started over who, in any gift exchange routine, got the more expensive gift. Perhaps sanity ruled there because they didn’t trust what kind of gift I might give them if we were exchanging gifts. I had smart friends but that is off the record. It makes perfect sense to me that friendships should never be dependent on giving gifts to each other. For me, the only tangible gift that makes sense is a gift from the fortunate, who have excess wealth, to the less fortunate who have too little wealth. I think Jesus agreed with me there too. That is a gift which makes sense. Somebody is in need and somebody was kind enough to help them out. That’s the best ethics, and I suspect evolution will eventually progress to this level, leaving the Trumphite mentality a minor footnote in history.
A point of clarity here. Once a grown adult with a job, I continued to buy my parents things, but only at times I knew they could use something. They were not big on spending a lot of money on things for themselves, so—for example—if they could use a microwave oven I would just buy it because I knew they would not otherwise. Stuff like that. When we went out to eat, which was often when I visited them (or they me), it would be rare for me to let them pay for the meal. This bothered them, but my reasoning was that for all my formative years they fed me, so I felt in debt for more meals than I could ever repay them. I remember how my grandmother would every Sunday take out to a restaurant one of her offspring’s family and pay for the meal. I was told she liked to do this. It seemed more the truth to me that she was quite lonely and if she didn’t do this weekly meal treat she would have been a lot more lonely. My feeling was that if some offspring could not afford to take her out to dinner, then just go visit her. Grandparents do a lot of things financially that are not done begrudgingly, but a fear of isolation from former sons and daughters is certainly in the mix. In my own mind, if we are lucky enough to have been raised properly, all the owing is from adult child to the parents and we ought to cut out allowing our parents to foot the bill. In America, our culture is such that whatever wealth is amassed by parents is ‘owed’ to their adult offspring, or it means the parents don’t love their offspring. This attitude is no small factor in why so much of our wealth keeps drifting into genetic cabals. It is also probably the biggest reason behind why so many siblings end up not getting along as they begin the competition for parental wealth. The siblings would often get along much better if they understood excess parental wealth was going into charity, or taxed as a means to return that wealth to the society from which it came. The percentage of people who agree with this is admittedly quite small. It would please me here to be wrong, but if right, our society is beginning to pay a terrible price for this endless unearned wealth accumulating in genetic cabals. It would seem that any grown adult, whose parents made every effort to raise them right in their formative years, should decline any further such unnecessary nurturing on principle alone. At that point any nurturing should be in the reverse direction—after all, if we live long enough we become ‘twice a child’.
The reality is this: if everyone with excess wealth (small or great) gave gifts to those in need there would be no one starving, no one dying from a curable disease, no one in a refugee camp, no one stuck in poor schools, no one lacking decent health care, no one without a job paying a ‘living wage’, etc. I know, this would not be perfect—some would, for varied reasons, manage or deserve to slip through the cracks.
Genuine gift giving from the more fortunate to the less fortunate is a for sure an action that will generate maximum personal contentment. The purpose of any ethical system is to reward those who do the ‘right’ thing. A ‘right’ thing, which is also ethical, generates the maximum reward. The reward is contentment. There is something very rewarding about sitting back after the fact, and realizing we did the ‘right’ thing, although doing the right thing is often difficult, may come with a personal price, and too often simply fails.
Genuine gift giving is not a road consistently traveled. For most of us, our earlier years are wrapped up in just trying to better ourselves, to make sense of so many things coming at us, competing in a fast paced ‘rat race’. Self serving preservation and personal advancement are a priority for most at an early age. To the extent we don’t get locked up in some kind of self-serving cocoon, similar to T.O., we are well aware that diversity in life comes loaded with inherent disadvantages and inherent advantages. We constantly see first hand, or via the media, the “still sad music of humanity”. Without endless help from the ‘have’s”, the ‘have-nots’ will achieve little contentment in their lives. We understand this concept perfectly when it comes to our pets, but somehow we see this same principle only spot-tingly with fellow humans. The ‘rat race’ instills this attitude in us from an early age: “I win, you lose, pardon my dust.”
The “I earned it” mentality is way overblown. We didn’t even earn the by-chance hook-up of a particular egg and sperm. Our whole personal existence was by chance. We come into life with a certain hand of cards, unearned. Then add the help we receive from so many others during our lifetime. Then add pure luck, like being at the right place at the right time. Then add the era in which we were born. Than add who our parents were. Then add the country and neighborhood into which we were born. Then add whether we attended good schools or had good health care. While this is just a partial list of things we didn’t ‘earn’, it is enough to make the point. All any of us have is an opportunity to play our dealt hand of cards well. Even here the inborn abilities to do this will vary all over all the place.
Some people view those failing to succeed in life with outright scorn: these ‘dregs’ on society need to be gated off and allowed to stew in their self imposed wretched life situations. To Emperor Trump, King of manipulating bankruptcy laws to make himself rich, wretches like refugees should not be given asylum, temporary or otherwise, since they will become terrorists and start blowing us up or shooting us down. Of course the multitude of domestic terrorists so far has not included a single admitted-to-this country refugee. Facts never get in the way of Trumpy’s feelings, or his philosophy of life: whenever two people interact, someone will get the short end of the stick—just be sure it is the other person. He is quite good at that and immensely proud of his self-serving life chase after his almighty dollar.
Perhaps the best scenario for our lives would be this (parts are tongue in cheek): Select the best parents and the best time and place to be born. Then train our parents to lead by good examples. After our formative years, have our parents cut us loose financially and limit their support to emotional/advisory roles in our lives. With effort, good luck, help from non genetic links, and enough talent we can move up the ladder in the rat race. It is necessary for us to learn as much about ourselves and other people so that we can know when ‘enough is enough’ for us in varied situations. We need avoid career choices which place us on the bottom rung of the ladder in a chosen career, and learn a marketable skill. Many of us were lucky enough to have gone down this road and achieved some successes. In a healthy society pensions and retirement plans are sufficient to live a modest lifestyle. Then it is time to get serious about using our excess wealth to help the less fortunate. It is the best way to maximize our contentment level in life—that is, grateful for the many advantages we had in life, we now do the right thing and help those for whom there were few such advantages. Between the gratitude for our own successes and the contentment from sharing with the less fortunate, life ends as it should, and as T.O. would say, “Fair is fair”.
America has gotten itself into a terrible bind. When we have 43% of our adults not earning enough money to qualify to pay federal income tax and have millions of people living in ghettoes where 60-70% of young people are unemployed, we have an almost hopeless situation on our hands. The best time to provide assistance to the less fortunate who live in these gated off ghettoes is not when they become adults. Too much damage as already been done—educationally, health-wise, nutrition-wise, personal safety-wise, opportunity-wise, and emotionally. Many people say pit-bulls are not dangerous if they are raised right. Probably true, but why is this not equally true for young children? Every society is responsible for providing the proper environment for all it’s young people. What kind of society operates on the principle that if a child is born with poor parents into a poor neighborhood with no good schooling, no good health care, no neighborhood safe to play in, and no opportunities for employment when of age—that when all this happens, by chance to the child—well “fuck it, I earned my good situation, and they can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” This essentially is the attitude, to varying degrees, in America today by too many.
Real gift giving is out, jailing is in, diversity is a curse—diversity (especially minorities) are a prime cause of our own failures, and money/things/electronic amusement/family is our religion. None of these things are bad in themselves, but they are when they become compulsive ferverized (made this word up) addictions, driven by misplaced priorities. The American frontier has long since disappeared, yet most of us pretend it hasn’t. We can’t very easily live off the land anymore, surrounded by a vast land of nature, independent and aloof. We have overpopulated the earth and all these ‘others’ are getting on our nerves, especially when all this pushing and shoving to get at the trough is right up in our face every day via various electronic gadgets. Our pleasure and rage centers are being manipulated endlessly until we live numbed up by it all. The complexities of modern problems overwhelm us, and we circle the wagons, put on blinders, and pray for some God to make everything ok.
Let me get back to gift-giving. The Average American spends $700 on holiday gifts, and I think that is just the Christmas holiday. If this assumption is true then we probably can throw in another $700 on all other sorts of gifts over the year, like birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, baby showers, etc.
This comes to $930 billion dollars. Now suppose we return the top tax rate to just 70% instead of the 90% it was during the Eisenhower year, and slapped on the same estate tax that existed then. Then raise the tax rate so the average person’s tax rate went up by 10%. I can’t get the figures here from google but we are talking trillions of dollars a year, all of which could be used as a GIFT to our society, especially the least fortunate. Every child and everyone would have good health care, our infrastructure would be the finest in the world, every child would have a good school, every worker would be paid a living wage, minimum wage and social security would go up each year with the cost of living, every student who could pass a strict entrance exam could get a free college education, everyone could have a 4 wk vacation and a 30 hr work week would be the new full time job work norm. Why in hell should machines doing so much of the work these days result in people working longer hours at insufficient pay? There is a clear reason why people in Scandinavian countries always score highest on the happiness index. Sure they pay steep taxes, but none of them have to worry about the things so many Americans have to worry about. What is left of their earnings is for pure pleasure stuff.
In the end I do believe in gift giving—including compulsory gift giving based on our ability to give, and all of the money spent on our society so that all citizens have a level playing field, so no one need live in the kind of ghettoes we have across our land today, no one need die from curable diseases, or live in areas with 70% unemployment. We tend to forget that if the 43% of Americans who don’t earn enough money to qualify to pay federal income taxes, were to earn ‘living wages’, then they would have money to spend on things and this stimulates economic growth. When we raise kids in better environments then we don’t have to have 25% of the people in jail across the globe in American jails—at a cost of $30,000 per year. The War on Drugs has been costing us $51 billion dollars a year. We have the highest incarceration rate in the World. We have used mandatory prison sentences to jail teenagers, who live in ghettoes, where the unemployment rate for them is 70%, for ten year sentences at an average cost of $30,000/yr. That’s $300,000 total for just one such teenager. 1.5 million citizens are arrested each year for non violent drug offenses. The number of students denied financial aid eligibility due to drug convictions is over 200,000. This, of course, helps to ensure they can never get a decent job, never vote, and helps lubricate their return to prison so we can again pay $30,000/yr to support them in the worst of all possible environments. If current illegal drugs were taxed at the rate we tax cigarettes and alcohol, we would have $46.7 billion dollars to spend on better schools in our ghettoes. Things finally are beginning to move in the right direction here as the reality of what politicians have been brainwashing the public for years is settling in.
When the “Golden Rule” becomes the global basis for ethics and every society thru government does their best to level the playing fields for the less fortunate then our world becomes a better place in which to live. God only knows what turmoil the evolutionary process will take us through to get there, but this process, regulated by the laws created by God to control the evolutionary process—this process will succeed, as it always has, sooner or later, to replace the ineffective with the effective over endless evolutionary Time. Many people wish they had won a big lottery, just once in their lives. Me, I already did, once in my life, when, by chance, I was born with endless unearned gifts, including the era in which I was born, the place I was born, etc. so that my twilight years are filled with gratitude for my successes, hardly grandiose or all that noteworthy, but were sufficient for ‘enough is enough’ to prevail. What good I can do for the less fortunate, with whatever excess wealth I possess, it easy enough to effectuate. “Fair is fair”, “what goes around should come around”, “enough is really enough”, and contentment is reward enough. It makes me feel I have repaid all those many kind people who aided me in so many ways, at so many different times in my life, even though they had no genetic tie or owed me a damn thing. They just did it, sometimes at great risk to themselves, and with time it all impacted on me to at least follow their example. “Fair is fair”.
