"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time," says Australian aboriginal elder Lilla Watson. "If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
Although helping has long been seen as a virtue, it hides a risky subtext. To be sure, the world is a much better place because people care about the well-being of others. But the form we give to our caring makes a big difference. In particular, I've come to believe that the framework of "helping" tends to separate people.
Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, puts it this way: "I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it's humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people."
It's a bit of a paradox: Our caring acts can inadvertently strengthen and solidify another's self-image as "needy."
Moreover, when they've become permanent beneficiaries of our good deeds, individuals, organizations, even entire societies may begin to take on a permanent victim mentality. We can act with the best of intentions and yet foster a lasting sense of deficiency and dependency, what psychologist Martin Seligman has termed "learned helplessness."
Street children in Africa and students in America have proven to me there's a better way to act on our caring: walk the path with others, side by side in kinship.
The Crippled Children's Society of Southern California marked its belief in this posture when it renamed itself AbilityFirst. The name symbolized confidence in the children it served. It proclaimed to the kids and their families what they were made of. And it reminded all those engaged in the agency's work that they were with these capable kids and their families, rather than stooping to help the pitiful.
"The greatest good you can do for another," wrote Benjamin Disraeli, "is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to them their own."
How might things be different if we always sent to others the message "I believe in you," rather than "I pity you so"?