The nineteenth-century notion of linear progress not only has collapsed but decayed. The cynical retreat of the nation-state, regressive programs of structural adjustment, repressive taxation, rising oil prices, gross inflation, market manipulation, food shortages, pandemics, drought, and wars have trapped not only the peoples of the two-thirds world but most of the rest of us in ‘a vicious cycle of increasing immigration, decreasing formal employment, falling wages, and collapsing revenues.’
“We need thoroughgoing, practical, genuine, systemic change in the present global order. At the same time, we sense a need for something deeper and beyond the moral attention that social justice accords to the distribution of the material and cultural conditions for human living. That something deeper and beyond, I suggest, is solidarity.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom
Solidarity is that empathy for the Other that impels us to act with them and for our mutual good. It transcends formal charity too: the system will never be able to keep up with peer-to-peer solidarity.
Crowdfunding is a powerful a way to move resources through society outside of institutions. And the tax code is still light-years behind a crowdfunding system that’s now more than a decade old.
We’re not quite at tax prep season yet, but if you design or participate in a crowdfunding campaign, don’t get caught out.