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The vast majority of people today live in little brick boxes crammed together in rabbit warren housing estates. Each family's domain is no more than a 'postage stamp' sized plot of land. Here they may freely stay. With the exception of a few public areas such as parks, the only other place they are free to move is on the public tarmac road. But they may not stay in public parks. They may not camp there - even for one night. If they wish to travel anywhere, they essentially need to be able to get there and back in a day. Those of limited means, like the poor and unemployed, are essentially trapped, like caged animals, in their little brick boxes.
In this unnatural state, life drags, frustration mounts, tensions build up. The results are inevitable:
Then, because people are all so tightly packed together, there are the all-too-frequent boarder disputes between neighbours in which fences seem to acquire a strange habit of creeping ever closer to your house while you are not at home.
The cause of this sad condition of life is capitalist greed. The land owner, speculator and builder all want to get as much profit out of as small a piece of land as they can. To achieve this, they need to pack as many houses on it as planning restrictions will allow them to get away with. They hire high-priced lawyers and expert witnesses to win appeals against planning refusals. They have the capital. They inevitably win.
Of course, the land owners, speculators and builders do not subject themselves to the cramped living conditions they impose on the majority. They use their massive profits to furnish themselves with spacious palaces set in boundless acreages.
The effect of capitalist greed is to imprison the suburban inhabitant in a constrictive environment, and place upon him a large life-long financial burden called a mortgage. This is not the natural state for the human animal. He needs space and freedom which he cannot have. He therefore becomes stressed and frustrated.
The suburban inhabitant knows he works as hard and as best he can. He also knows this does not get for him what his nature requires. He therefore rightly assumes that it is somebody else who has created and is sustaining his sad condition. He therefore looks for somebody else to blame.
The real culprit is, of course, capitalist greed. But the capitalist is rich and clever. He employs some of his capital to use mass-media advertising and editorial to divert the blame for the suburbanite's sad condition away from himself and on to a defenceless scapegoat, namely, the poor and unemployed.
The average working suburbanite is thereby brainwashed into believing that the reason for his financial burden, and inability to escape from his sad suburban existence, is high taxes. And the sole reason he has to pay high taxes is to support a sub-population of lazy good-for-nothing layabouts called the poor and the unemployed. The poor and the unemployed thus become the focus of his frustration.
Since, in the mind of the average working individual, the poor and the unemployed are to blame for his frustrations, he does not, in consequence, regard them as deserving of his charity. In fact, he sees them as decidedly undeserving of anything.
But there is a conscience in the human mind. It can never be suppressed completely. In a world of such obvious disparity, it cannot be easily appeased without action. The average working individual therefore needs some worthy cause on which to focus his sympathy and charity.
Nevertheless, he is a busy man. He cannot afford to devote much consideration as to where he should focus of his sympathy and charity. He is therefore most easily wooed by charities whose causes he can most readily appreciate and understand such as:
He seems blissfully unaware that the Third World poverty which attracts his sympathy was originally caused, and is to a large extent now sustained, by First World capitalist exploitation. Of course, this blissful unawareness is engineered by capitalist controlled mass-media and governments.
His sympathy or charity will never reach those whose problems are too difficult for him to understand through casual consideration. Neither will they reach any of those whose disabilities are not visibly obvious. Among these are:
Though my wife has suffered the latter for over 30 years, she has yet to receive any help - or even contact - from any of the so-called charities which supposedly help those with her affliction.
Its fading embers of morality thus force the apathetic majority of the modern capitalist democracy to pay lip service to the needs of the deserving needy minorities in its midst, appeasing their consciences through publicly visible acts of charity. But these reward only those causes which:
Consequently, those in greatest need, receive not; while those who receive most are they who already have most with which to promote themselves to get even more. It is capitalism by another name. This perverted mode of conscience appeasement makes itself manifest in modern suburbia in the endless charity bags shoved through people's letter boxes.
A precession of self-appointed do-gooders knock on your door, shaking their tins in your face to try to shame you into giving what you need to feed and clothe your own children. If you refuse, their rehearsed politeness cannot hide their silent cry of "Scrooge!".
The problem with these people is that they seem to have got their Dickensian characters mixed up. In modern suburbia, things are not necessarily as they appear. The modern suburban house may be the nightly resting place of a highly-paid double-income couple who commute to the city each day to make their countless thousands with which they fly off to the four corners of the world several times a year, living life to the full. On the other hand, it may contain a couple struggling to keep their children provided for on the misery of 'benefit', the breadwinner having been severed from his career unexpectedly, just as he was about to reach his peak 'earning' phase.
So beware, Mrs Tinshaker, for you cannot know upon whose door you knock. It may be that of Mr & Mrs Average. Or it may be the door of Tiny Tim. There is one thing you can be sure of. The house of the real Mr Scrooge, in today's capitalist society, is way beyond the streets on which you will be allowed to collect. The dogs and security cameras would not let you anywhere near his citadel without a prior appointment. And the likes of you are most unlikely to get one. To the real poor and needy in your midst, to those whom capitalism has robbed of the opportunities they deserve, what kind of neighbour are you?