To Give or to Take

"Don't try to take something away from a person, because you can't give them something they need in return." That was one of the pieces of advice my mother gave me when I was growing up, and the older I get the more I see the wisdom of it. 

Sometimes we take away a person's culture and meaning. My grandfather told stories of going to a Catholic mission school for the local Ojibwa tribe (my family had married out and assimilated by then) and watching the Ojibwa kids get beaten by the nuns for speaking their own language. The nuns justified it by saying they were "beating the Indian" out of the children and that they would be better for that. I am wary of proselytizing religion for that reason, because it seems to me a manipulation to take away a culture's gods.

When we take a problem away from a person, we take away their self-determination and initiative, and leave them with another dependency in their life. This is why therapists and case managers believe it's vitally important for the client to come to them, so that it's their wish to exchange the problem situation for something better. This is very hard for families and friends of the person with the problem, because the most they can do is persuade their loved one. The person with the problem has to make the decision to seek help.

So our best intentions may be wrong if we try to use them to take away from others what we perceive as burdens. Those burdens may be their culture or their crutch or their curse, but it's theirs. Hell might be preferable to loss of their culture, and the devil they know preferable to the one they don't know. Rather than taking away, we should think of giving, and giving in a way that honors culture and struggle and autonomy.