CHARITY - Begins at home, ends up nowhere

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Charity Begins at Home, Ends Up Nowhere We've all becomes slaves of bureaucracy.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER Friday, November 16, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

After the World Trade Center fell down, people did something we are good at in America. They sent money. The Red Cross pleaded, singers sang and people everywhere sent checks. An amazing $1.3 billion. It has now become something of a scandal that so little of this benevolence has been disbursed. The givers are asking how this could be.

It is a good thing that people are asking what happened to their money. Because once they figure this one out, they'll also know what happened to other important American institutions that don't do what they're supposed to very well anymore, such as big-city public schools or the FBI and CIA. These institutions discovered that they had become answerable, all the time, constantly, to a never-ending movement which believes that any identified difficulty, problem or unfairness in life can be fixed by a rule, procedure or law.

I don't think a metaphor exists that can describe just how many such directives now dictate how we are allowed to work and function as a society. Yes, the "bureaucratization" of life has been described at length and laughably for some time. Just now, though, it doesn't seem so amusing. We've paid a big price for letting this happen to institutions like the schools. But a few months ago the price became unimaginably large.

-- Anonymous, November 15, 2001


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