April 7, 2016 4:21 AM

When is a random act of kindness synonymous with creeping socialism and creating dependency?

Restaurants waste a lot of food, and even though big companies like Starbucks have recently changed their policies, a lot still goes into the bin when it could, well, go into people’s bellies. So when a restaurant owner in Kochi, India, saw a homeless woman eating from a trashcan, she knew she had to do something. So Minu Pauline came up with a brilliant idea. Realizing that her restaurant, Pappadavada, had a lot of leftover food, she decided to put a fridge outside so homeless people could help themselves. It’s open 24/7 and anybody is free to use it. The fridge receives regular donations from restaurant patrons and other people, and Pauline herself leaves around 75-80 portions of food per day…. “Money is yours,” she told The Huffington Post. “But resources belong to society. That’s the message I want to send out. If you’re wasting your money…you’re wasting society’s resources.”

The bad news is that we live in a world in which random acts of kindness are rare enough to be newsworthy. The good news is that there are people like Minu Pauline who see a need and determine they simply can’t ignore it. Here in America, if Ms. Pauline were to do something similar, the local health department would be pushing back out of food safety concerns (Food-borne illnesses, don’tchaknow??) and neighbors would be complaining about the large numbers of homeless people handing around the neighborhood. More than a few otherwise well-meaning people would be decrying the giving away of food to those in need as the worst sort of creeping, incipient SOCIALISM!!!! and CREATING DEPENDENCY!!!! and SOMETHING FOR NOTHING!!!!

As the old saying lays out, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Our world is one in which the Law of Unintended Consequences is held to extend even to selfless acts of kindness. A homeless person eats leftover food from a refrigerator such as Ms. Pauline’s and gets sick. Before you know it, lawyers are involved and what began as a simple expression of an honest desire to do a good thing for the right reasons is blown up into something malevolent and unrecognizable. Thus it is that the homeless are left to eat out of dumpsters and trash cans, which hardly seems an effective means of protecting food safety.

I can’t help but think of the good that could be done if something similar were to happen here. What if restaurant owners decided their unused food could be put to better use than dumping it in a trash can? What if Ms. Pauline’s idea could be adapted and employed for the benefit of those in need? What if those down on their luck could have access to good, healthy, safe food that doesn’t have to be scavenged from a dumpster? What is it about this sort of kindness that seems like such a radical idea?

In America, doing the right thing is seldom as simple as doing the right thing.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on April 7, 2016 4:21 AM.

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