To Have and To Have Not – A case of the Hyphenation Paradox

Poverty bites and it bites hard.  It brands its indelible mark on the psyche and like a red badge of courage, it leaves the affected with an inexorable desire and insatiable anxiety never to be marked again.  I hold mine close and proudly, using it as a guide for my philanthropy to others.  I use it to remind myself that the ‘spirit of giving’ is yearlong, 24-7-365, and I try to do my part, however insignificant. 

I never pass up a chance to give, even when I know it may come back to slap me in the face.  Recently, I had such an experience.  What makes this experience bittersweet is my after-the-fact knowing that I gave to a person who cries poverty at every turn and yet lives better than I do.  I was duped, and I am sorry to say that it was by a person who played on my ethno-cultural sympathies. 

Yes, in her sob story, she played the ethnic card and even went beyond that to hammer it in.  She played the new-immigrant-living-on-a-visa ethnic card.  I got suckered in so deep, you would have thought she gave me a lollipop – one of those tootsie roll kinds with the chewy centers.  Now, the problem I have today is not that I gave her as much as I did.  Furthermore, the sting of knowing the church to which I would have donated would have more use than she, is fairly mild.  No, the problem is that she is one of those people - the ones that take advantage of others by feigning poverty, humility, and need - preying on your generosity.

What really lies underneath it all?  One word: ego.  And she exhibited a full-blown, disgustingly egocentric, careless, reckless, vain, and greedily predatory self-indulgence. 

The worst of it?  I work with her.  In the office, I see first-hand how she pretends not to understand English to perpetuate her laziness, how she makes endless mistakes and passes it off on others, and how she flaunts a sense of entitlement to avoid doing certain tasks, always leaving it to others.  When she wants something, she has a strong command of the language and knows the ways of capitalist America.  She is on e-bay everyday purchasing something, indulging in luxury items.  When anything is required of her and when she is called upon to do anything she simply does not wish to do, she uses the ‘foreigner excuse’ and milks it for all it is worth.  In all my life, I have never come across such flagrant manipulation.  Then again, I have not been living long.

Anyway, enough time spent on her.  What she does is to her own detriment and unfortunately, to her daughter’s.  What good I can take out of this – the sweet bitter – is to serve as a reminder and example of one aspect of hyphenation: the hyphenation paradox.  According to dictionary.com, paradox comes from the Greek para (to mean beyond) + doxa (to mean opinion) and means any of the following: “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth; a self-contradictory and false proposition; any person, thing, or situation exhibiting an apparently contradictory nature; an opinion or statement contrary to commonly accepted opinion”.  When I couple paradox with hyphenation, it usually is to expose a truth, however (un)pleasant, that I have been observing for quite some time.
Often under the blazing light of examination and (over)exposure, what is under inspection becomes further obscured by scrutiny: ‘blinded by the light’ syndrome.  How this takes deeper import under hyphenation is in unrealized potential.  Whereas hyphenation symbolizes potentiality – the potential of potential – in all its volatile creativity and omnipotence, hyphenation paradox symbolizes an ersatz ‘potentiality’ quite distinct from potentiality proper.  This becomes the phenomenon of potential unrealized by being realized.  It is realized seemingly in the immediate through manipulation, greed, and the ‘negative drive’.  When this immediate gratification is feted and the ‘dream’ is realized through sordid means, the true potential has not only not been realized, but also it has never even been touched.  Instead, it has been mirrored in all its resplendent chicanery that slaps at us in mockery.

When we look to see the light and are given dark dressed up as light, we would be fools to use the guise to light our passage.  We would end up behind when we would be forward.  In other words, we would end up in the same place having inched nowhere.

Zero-sum game.

There is nothing worse then spending time and effort over nothing.  To go forward in time and energy just to stay in the same ‘spot’ is worse than going backwards because you have stolen from yourself the experience and its knowledge. 

Quite a bitter chew.

When Daniel Gilbert writes that the smart person “should keep on walking” when “greed masquerades as need” in his article, “Compassionate Commercialism” (The New York Times, 25 March 2007), I would rather suggest that it is the smarter person who wins by maintaining his own humanity, continuing his philanthropic optimism unchanged.  The memory never fades as long as it strengthens our character and helps us move forward, steadfast and onward!  It is a natural human tendency to help those in need and it is a loss to man when one heart hardens: 

“If a plant can not live accordingly to its nature, it dies and so a man.”
--Henry David Thoreau, On Civil Disobedience