When I came home from church this morning, I opened the front door, stepped inside, and was alarmed to detect a nasty smell of unknown origin. I don’t know what it is. It smells like garbage. The neighbors dog did get into our garbage yesterday and he strew it all over the driveway, but I picked that up and there’s no reason for that smell to have seeped inside. Guess I’ll have to root around until I find it. It is almost the season of simmering autumnal potpourri, but I’d prefer to start with a clean, neutral base.
At church this morning, predictably, there was news of sister congregations in the Gulf area and great plans to contribute time, energy and money to help them and their members. If, however, you aren’t a member of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Church, sorry; we can’t help. This is a fine example of “taking care of one’s own”, which I have come to think of as a chief moral failing in this universe.
And yet, the world is so vast. I have to admit that you can’t work backwards from Utopia and expect miracles. Perhaps there’s some wisdom about the limits of altruism here that I’m not seeing. Perhaps church leaders have long realized that you’ve got to work with what’s in human nature—not with what you wish was there. Dividing people up into manageable bundles and trying to form emotional connection between the bundles might be a strategy that actually gets us somewhere, rather than a lot of raging, weeping, wailing, complaining and finger-pointing. (Not that there aren’t problems in our country; there are, and I have to wonder if this hurricane won’t turn out to be some sort of blessing in disguise, through what it reveals about ourselves and our government.)
Anyway, I see, by a quick Google search, I’m not the first person to have wondered about the limits of altruism.
12:53:41 PM 
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