Young wisdom
“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
These words, from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, bespeak an attitude of mind that we still encounter 150 years after they were written.
Some people in comfortable financial circumstances tend to regard the poor as being responsible for their own misfortunes and feel they should be made to suffer for their misdoings.
On the other hand, we have a new generation coming on whose attitude to life and living fill me with encouragement.
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Canada is going through an industrial revolution. Thanks to social safety nets we don’t have the starvation and massive migrations of Dickens’s time. However, those nets are having holes torn in them and society is forced to adjust.
In December I got a first-hand look at how this change is manifesting itself. Around the cities and larger towns the Salvation Army has placed kettles where local citizens ring bells and encourage the public to donate so that deprived families can have food. I’ve taken a turn at ringing these bells.
In the past the most frequent donors were Second World War veterans and their families who remembered assistance they received from the Salvation Army overseas and in Canada. This year it was obvious that the most frequent donors were people in their teens and twenties.
These young people apparently have recognized that governments, in their pell-mell haste to pay off horrendous deficits, have removed much of the public support for needy families and handed a large share of the job to private agencies. It’s a real faith restorer.
