Human nature and our better angels
Here’s a sentence we don’t hear often, and certainly not often enough:
“Human nature is inclined to be generous and supportive.”
This from Roche Schulfer, executive director and CEO of Goodman Theater describing Goodman’s involvement with Season of Concern, a Chicago-based charity that helps theater artists in need throughout the region.
In a story about the charity, our theater writer Barbara Vitello reported Monday that Goodman and its patrons have provided a quarter of the $4 million raised by Season of Concern since its launch in the late 1980s. Goodman ends its popular holiday performances of “A Christmas Carol” with solicitations for the charity. Oakbrook Terrace’s Drury Lane Theatre, and many others in the city and suburbs, do something similar, asking patrons who’ve already paid a respectable sum for tickets to a performance to pitch in a little more to help artists who may be struggling with health or financial problems in a business known for its uncertainties.
Stage manager Larry Baker of Drury Lane told Vitello the program has much to do with the connection that theaters make with their patrons.
“They love what we do and they want to support us,” he said. “The two hours you spend together in that room, you bond ... I think that’s why audiences are so generous in giving.”
Whether through bonding or human nature or both, it’s important to stop and take stock of our better angels from time to time, and it seems especially worthwhile as the 2023 holiday season fades in the rearview mirror and we head into what appears certain to be a contentious and combative election season.
We at the Daily Herald and Paddock Publications, along with our partner the McCormick Foundation, have our own reasons to focus on those angels this month. In the third year of our holiday partnership, we distributed more than $58,000 to five suburban charities through our Neighbors in Need program, which solicits donations from readers with a 50% match from McCormick, to help suburban residents dealing with problems of hunger, health care and homelessness.
The figure, by the way, was double the amount raised in 2022.
By some standards, these amounts may not seem eye popping. The sum of our Neighbors in Need donations hardly compares to the millions or tens of millions that huge charities collect, and the $4 million that Season of Concern has raised over the past 27 years may seem modest by some measures. But efforts like these are important indicators of the fundamental generosity of our people. They support important work, and they’re funded by people who are made aware of a problem and happily throw in whatever they can to help alleviate it.
As the end-of-year flush of joy and good cheer gives way to the harshness of a January winter and the cynicism of political campaigns, we can quickly forget that the former is the important part of our nature and, in many ways, the more common. Yes, we argue over taxes and immigration and government spending and political behaviors and all the rest, and this, too, is in our nature. But it is also our habit to be generous and supportive, and somehow, we always manage to demonstrate that this shines through in spite of all that is negative around us.