27/09/2024 / Boris Cvek
reading time 3 minutes
What is the point of helping? Not to make me feel good. The purpose of help is to help the disabled person realistically and as much as possible. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus does not say: he helped him to feel good himself. He says: he helped him because he felt compassion. Compassion leaves the self and looks to the other.
Help can even become something completely perverted and indifferent to the real fate of those who are helped. For women with breast cancer, Gayle Sulik described this perfectly in Pink Ribbon Blues (Oxford University Press 2012). Pink ribbon culture, raising money to help sick women, cultivating a survivor cult, marketing events of big companies. After all, it is about helping poor women, so it must be right! Except that everyone is actually indifferent to the real situation of those victims. They gave their money, they feel good, they can think of something else.
This topic comes back to me even today, after the floods, in connection with the day of Czech statehood, the feast of Duke Wenceslas. I read that, according to research by Median, the majority of the population is convinced that the Czech Republic is well prepared for disasters. They should probably ask people in Krnov, Opava, Jeseník and others. If the biggest rainfall in the history of the Czech Republic, as happened now in Jeseníky, falls somewhere else, it will probably be a big problem there as well. And it will happen. But there is an even more acute question: who will realistically and effectively help those disabled people?
We must bow to the efforts of the many volunteers at the flood site who are undoubtedly providing real help. But what should others, the wider public, do? For example, those people who can be seen and heard? Pushing the government with questions about what it is doing for those people now and here, right now, immediately. But that practically does not happen. We live in illusions about state sovereignty and ignore the real function of the state. Well, there are no doctors, there are no places in schools, court workers are on strike, there is no immediate effective aid for victims of disasters, but most importantly, we have sovereignty. If it all falls apart, it doesn’t matter, after all, we will help each other with collections in a rush from doing good.
What is the state and statehood for? There is talk of an effective state. But it should be concretely and realistically felt, especially where people need help, nota bene in areas affected by natural disasters. This is the test and the experience that gives people confidence in institutions, in politicians, in the government. What is the affected people after it released some billions? What will it bring them? How does it change their lives for the better?
Saint Wenceslas was a Christian, he is a Christian saint. We made it a symbol of Czech statehood. Perhaps this does not mean walking around the skull, but effective help to the sufferers. Perhaps this is meant to mean that we want the state to be such that it does not end up in the hands of those who will make St. Wenceslas the patronage of murder and tyranny, as was the case under the Nazis. For this, two things are needed: for the Czech state to be firmly anchored in Western Europe without illusions of sovereignty that never existed, but even more is needed for a democratic state to be able to gain the trust of the people so that it never leaves them in the lurch.
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