Doing Good Deeds
But Helping the Wrong People
By Daniel Muniz

When I was in college, the campus ministry of the Catholic university I attended would routinely do a number of community service projects around the city. One particular project that was quite popular among the student body was to paint houses in the many blighted neighborhoods that the university was located in.

It was a fairly straightforward task. A big group of students with paint brushes and paint cans in hand would pile into a couple of vans and trek off to the house of a needy family to paint it. And with plenty of helping hands, the job could be done in a snap. The overall result would be improving the rundown appearance of a seedy neighborhood one house at a time and eventually, that part of town would lose its squalid image.

One friend of mine was an older non-traditional student. Unlike his peers who were in their late teens or early twenties, he was in his early thirties and married with two middle-school school age children. During one semester, he decided that this type of volunteer work would be good for the soul so he signed up to paint a house.

However, after his first and only stint at this community service project, he came back disillusioned.

He was furious that this supposedly dilapidated house that he helped paint had cable television installed in it.

Now my buddy is a person of limited means especially being married with two young children. I had also visited my friend’s house before and he lives in a very modest dwelling which happens to be located in a different part of the very same blighted neighborhoods that the university’s community service projects targeted.

But what had really irked him was that this supposedly needy family who needed their house painted was a household not very much different from his own (husband, wife, and two kids). And to add insult to injury, their house really didn’t look all that different than the house he was currently living in with it being around the same age, same physical condition, and about the same approximate square footage.

He told me that he could understand if the head of household was someone who was elderly or wheelchair bound. In a scenario like that, there would be no way for the job to get done and the neighborhood could not be improved without the assistance from a number of helping hands. But in this situation, that was not the case.

My friend explained that he just didn’t feel right about helping an able-bodied man who was around his own age. And what had really annoyed my buddy to no end was that he didn’t have cable installed for his television because he couldn’t afford it since he and his wife had to penny pinch to stretch their budget for him to be in college. The bottom line was that if this guy could afford cable, then he could afford several cans of paint. And as an able-bodied man, he could paint the entire house himself instead have a group of naïve college kids do it for him.

Unfortunately, scenarios like this happen all the time.

There are plenty of well-meaning people who have donated money or who have stretched out a helping hand only to realize that the people they are assisting may not really need it.

The reason is because the definition of poor has taken on a very broad meaning in today’s modern society.

To the uninitiated, poverty would mean a destitute family often unable to feed all its family members with everyone wearing tattered clothes and crammed into a one or two room house or apartment that lacked proper ventilation or heating. But that is not necessarily the case anymore. According to Census Bureau statistics, very few people who are classified as poor actually fit that description. In fact, most people who are in poverty are living in far better conditions than people who lived in previous generations like during the Great Depression.

Yes, there are some desperate situations where certain people are in very dire need especially when it involves the death or incapacitation of a breadwinner or some kind of catastrophic illness.

Now I happen to know a little bit about poverty because I grew up in the barrio. Although nearly everyone in my neighborhood usually didn’t have any money, I never knew of any of my neighbors who were on the brink of starvation. In fact, obesity was a problem for some of the kids I grew up with.

The real issue about poverty stems from how the working poor can make the transition into the great middle class. The non-working poor were never going to make that leap because, well, they weren’t working. Not doing anything doesn’t pay very well and it is a lousy career path that won’t improve your standard of living.

However, that didn’t mean that we never experienced any financial hardship. When my parents were part of the working poor, they constantly struggled to make ends meet. However, my family consisted of able-bodied people who painted our own house, repaired our own roof, mowed our own lawn, and did a lot of hard work on our own. In fact, it was this work ethic that allowed my parents to escape the barrio and find a nice house in the suburbs.

While I believe that it is great that there are those who are willing to do good deeds to improve neighborhoods and lift people out of poverty, perhaps there ought to a focus on only helping those who are unable to help themselves because they are the ones who truly need it. As for everyone else, there is nothing wrong with letting them buy their own cans of paint and painting their own house by themselves.

Any opinions or views expressed herein belong solely to the author and does not represent any employer, organization, political party, governmental agency, or any other entity and do not necessarily reflect the views of the site owner or its participants.