Chuggers and ruggers: Good News appears bad news

I've been think a bit lately about being approached in the streets beacause while it doesn't happen to me a great deal, it could. You see, in the streets round where I work, there are often chuggers (charity muggers) and recently Mormons and JW's. Now the reason I don't get approached is that I take evasive action quite a lot. I'm aware of taking trajectories as I walk to put me in a position to be less likely to be approached and avoiding making eye contact. When I am addressed directly, I tend to say things like "I'm not interested" or "I'm in a hurry" (which is true when I say it) or "no thanks".

What I'm mostly reflecting on, though, is why I don't want to engage. An article from a few years back identified one aspect:

Some people – though not as many as you might think – consider "chuggers" to be an infringement on their right to walk down the street without being accosted. They believe chuggers – or face-to-face street fundraisers, in plain English – guilt-trip people into giving, while denying donors the opportunity to give to the charities they want to at a time of their choosing.

… All these "asks" have the potential to make the donor feel a bit guilty if they choose not to give. But, as any fundraiser will tell you, if you don't ask, you don't get: people rarely give spontaneously to charity.

Pasted from <http://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2011/sep/08/street-fundraisers-invade-personal-space>

Certainly part of my inner reaction is to the guilt-trip implied: I find myself composing possible justifications, "I already give 10% of my earnings to charities ...". I think that self-justificatory response (never actually said except once when someone came to my door) tells me that I'm feeling that they are making a moral claim on me which I feel that I would be judged negatively -and wrongly- on (and of course I'm projecting that: they may not be judging me at all). That's somewhere in the vicinity of guilt. If the article is right and lots of people don't actually feel that way, then clearly that' mostly my problem. On the other hand though, the article describes by implication a number of avoiding or deflecting tactics that are clearly in common enough use to make me think that a reasonable number of us don't want to engage. In fact some of the discussion leads me to think that a number of people are quite anxious or defensive in brushing off approaches.

I think that the defensiveness could often be about guilt arousal or at least feeling implied judgement. By that latter term I mean that we are being put into the position of appearign to refuse to help sad soulful kittens, or more seriously, hungry or abused children or whatever the charity is concerned with. That is damaging to our self-image if we consider ourselves averagely or better-than-averagely empathic and concerned about relieving suufering.

I found another well expressed couple of paragraphs on the discomfort of avoiding chuuging:

Whilst I am generally in favour of the concept of charity and I understand charities need to promote/advertise in order to raise revenue, I have to say I have found this aggressive on the street promotion quite intimidating and annoying. I wouldn't have minded perhaps if it was just a one-off event or even a couple of days but it has been more like two weeks solid now that they've been there. And I can't get away from it as at the moment I have to go into town three days a week for hospital appointments. So three days a week I have to walk down these streets and be faced with up to five people in a row trying to accost me as I walk by - if the first one doesn't stop you, the next one (5 metres further on) will be calling out to you, and then the next etc etc etc.

It's reaching the point where I dread walking down those streets. I hate being accosted and I hate having to give them an excuse why I can't/don't want to stop - and some of them are very persistent and even when you say, "Sorry, I can't stop," they carry on cajoling, saying, "Just for one minute..." etc. I already make monthly donations to charities that I choose to support and I kind of resent being made to feel uncomfortable on a nearly daily basis by charity workers hassling me! I can imagine it must be even more annoying for people who work in the area and have to go out on those streets every day to buy lunch etc! I dislike anyone (market researchers, people trying to sell me things etc) hassling me on the street but when it's for a charity, it somehow makes you feel guilty for rebuffing their approach!

Pasted from <http://community.babycentre.co.uk/post/a7173445/wyoo_charity_promoters_on_the_street> (see some of the responses to the article at the end of this post)

I note the words of response: "intimidating"; "annoying"; "accost"; "dread"; "having to give an excuse"; "cajoling"; "resent"; "uncomfortable"; "hassling". Here the additional thing seems to be about the inconvenience of it. This underlies my own 'busy' responses: I've actually often gone out for particular purposes, I usually have limited time (often I'm going to an appointment or catchin a bus) and not just sauntering around looking for something to do.  I think the writer is right about the guilty feeling when it's a charity and I can imagine for some people that on top of inconvenience might give rise to the insulting and offensive responses implied in the Guardian article.

It's not quite the same with ruggers (I just made that up: religious muggers). I note in that last quoted section, that the more general statment which applies to market researchers and sales-pitchers (they don't mention religious propagators but I imagine the same sort of reaction) are disliked for "hassling". I notice that my own inner response to market researchers is less anxious and evokes less self-justification inwardly. Perhaps because I don't see their appraoch as making any claims on me.

So, what about ruggers? I have to admit I've been one in the past. We might argue that it's not asking money from anyone but rather offering a great gift but that's not really how it comes over. In reality most people frame an approach from a rugger in the ame sorts of ways: at beat they might be seen as a market-researcher and quite often, judging from the reactions, ruggers are seen more like chuggers. I think I'd have to argue that on the whole approaching people in this way is not embodying "good news" and because of the largely negative framing of it is in fact counter-productive.

I have a further concern in this respect. If a religious group in a university was doing this, what should be done, if anything? Well, it seems to me that there'd be a right to promote one's views and indeed ones events. On the other hand most policies on harrassment and bullying say, in effect, that there's a prima facie case to answer if someone feels tat they have been harrassed or bullied. Looking back at the reactions I've discovered in the articles quoted above and in my own sel-reflection, I'd say that there is a high risk that if someone wanted to object and claim harrssment, the kinds of words used above would make it seem very likely that they might be judged to have a point. I suspect that the reason that universities have 'no proselytisation' rules and restrictions on leafletting is driven largely by the sometimes fierce dislike of many people to being approached by strangers with an agenda. It's not directly or only a religious matter, it's a matter of neighbourliness
-and that implies a theological evaluation rooted in doing to others as you'd have them do to you ...

Some other responses from <http://community.babycentre.co.uk/post/a7173445/wyoo_charity_promoters_on_the_street>

I don't want to have to look a person in the eye and justify my skintness, I don't want to have to lie about why I cant stop and speak

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 It is invasive for people who live and work in the area to be stopped every day when they're just trying to go for lunch or whatever.

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I hate being hassled in the street and think it should be outlawed, it's basically intimidation and bullying yet as long as they have a little badge on saying they have a license to be on the street they are allowed to do it.

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 i tried to carry on walking but he blocked my path. i said i was in a rush but he said it wouldn't take long. i let him talk and when he'd finished his spiel i said i couldn't afford to have another direct debit going out of my account. he said 'not even for £2 a month?' i said no, and reminded him he'd actually been asking for more than that. then he looked down at my shopping bags judgingly and said to me 'having a nice shopping spree?' i was livid! i simply said that not that i had to justify myself to him, but i was shopping for the first time in over a year and was only doing so because i was pregnant and none of my clothes fitted anymore. with that i walked off.

Social media killing off quiet reflection?

It's possible that I'm about to disagree with Justin Welby -though mostly it's a disagreement with the Torygraph's headline (Social media killing off quiet reflection, says Justin Welby ) and soundbite reporting a recent speech of his.

 “Instant reaction has replaced reflective comment.

“That is a reality that you deal with in politics and it demands a new reality of ways in which we accept one another, love each other, pray for each other.

“The best answer to a complex issue … is not always given in 140 characters.



Basically, it looks to me like the Torygraph headline writer is seeking to build and feed something of a moral panic about twitter by co-opting 'the church' into a 'modern life /social media is rubbish (things were better in the old days)' trope.  The effect of that kind of contextualising is to psychologically elide Justin's caveat phrase 'not always given in ...'



My response to this kind of trope is to recall that we human beings have always (I suspect ever since we have been able to have conversations) struggled with immediate reactions, over-simplification on the one hand and on the other hand trying to encourage more considered and generous responses. From one point of view, Twitter is just a further medium for this age-old bifurcation of response. Now, admittedly, the brevity does make it easy to offend -but then in many an animated conversation we are reacting quickly and offense is easily given and taken (and sometimes apologies and explanations are given -which can happen in tweeted exchanges too). Nor are printed media proof against cavalier dismissals and gross oversimplifications. What Twitter can do positively is to give the possibility of an extended dialogue of short interventions in which people could, over time, explore more thoroughly some issue. I've been part of many a conversation verbally and even on newsgroups (remember them?) where instant brief reactions have given way to longer discussions -sometimes thoughtful and sometimes intemperate: both of which can happen on Twitter.



it is true that 140 characters make nuance difficult (in one tweet at least), but we should observe what actually happens when twitter is used for discussions or arguments involving more depth and breadth of topic: people give hyperlinks to blog posts, articles etc and briefly state why they think it is important/helpful etc. Tweets then come to act as a kind of newspaper headline drawing attention to the content they head up.



So we should be wary of essentialising Twitter as if it is only 140 characters and that we have only come up with one usage for it. It is, in fact, part of an evolving media ecology. Part of the evolution is in the way it references, contains and is contained by other media. Another part of the ongoing development is of the social dance of developing mores and conventions: what counts as polite and rude and so forth.



At base we have human beings trying to communicate for a variety of reasons with a range of imagined and actual audiences. Human beings who are very adept in the aggregate at making communication work well enough within the constraints of bandwidth, signal noise and contextual meanings. One tweet does not a conversation end; we should not judge the medium by static standards but rather take it in as a dynamic of human communication and observe how people actually overcome the constraints -such as the brevity of 140 characters in the face of the desire to communicate a whole lot more.



in fact, what I think is most important about that bit of +Justin's speech is the call for generosity -charity- of interpretation given that widespread messaging is possible. In effect, is this not a call for us to see past the possible elisions and misunderstandings of short messages and to engage with open-heartedness with the possibility that there is a whole hinterland of understanding and perspective by human beings who are, in many ways, very like ourselves. Can we not exercise generosity by asking for further information and seeing through the exchange to an end in greater mutual understanding? That too is possible via Twitter.



Is this not the age-old challenge of communication?

Angels unawake: Dreaming in Different Cultures

I'm not alone in noticing, vaguely, that the Bible has a not insignificant amount of revelation by dream going on. Nor am I alone, I imagine, in thinking how utterly unlikely that seems to occur in my experience. And now, for the first time really, I've found something that feels like it might get somewhere closer to making spiritual experience in dreams seem more plausible. It's here: To Dream in Different Cultures  and the interesting question it poses is this:

the intriguing question is whether different sleep cultures encourage different patterns of spiritual and supernatural experience. That half-aware, drowsy state is a time when dreams commingle with awareness. People are more likely to have experiences of the impossible then. They hear their mother, many miles distant, speaking their name, or they see angels standing by the window, and then they look again and they are gone.

it kind of chimed with my more recent experiences of being between sleep and wakeful. And, come to think of it, such experiences as I can recall from childhood. More recently, I've found that I might be reading before sleep and my tiredness is such that I start to fall asleep at the book or screen. But, the strange thing is to find that somehow my slide into sleep has become a slide into reading a dream book almost identical superficially to the one I am reading, yet, when I wake after a few moments (minutes?) I realise, was saying something entirely different from what the author of the book in front of me wrote and had printed. I have vague recollections of some interesting ideas for plots or takes on my recent life being the subject matter of these dream paragraphs.

As a child, I recall a few times of dreaming in that time between being asleep and waking for the day; one time so vivedly did I dream of a cap-gun under my pillow, that I was a little bewildered to find on waking properly, that the toy was not there after all.

So, to consider a time when 'dreams conmingle with awareness' now becomes  imaginable to me because I recognise the experience -I think.

But this doesn't necessarily help with such things being revelatory or spiritually significant: my cap gun seems not particularly so, for example much though it reveals something of my desires at the age of about 6 years old. And yet, if we do wish to claim that in some way the processes of reading scripture, giving attention to God, reflecting on our inner and outer lives, sharing our lives and being immersed in rituals does genuinely give us insight into God's communication with us, then these hemi-conscious states are not ruled out from being part of the mix. Indeed, since they seem to be plausibly times/places where our desires can be manifested in some way in a visionary sort of way, it seems plausible to me that they could re-present to us some of the processing our mind-brains may have been doing in relation to our spirituality.
At the very least.
And if God does, perhaps, sometimes, somehow get involved more unmediatedly in the business of mind-changes (with all the implications that would have for having some physical effects on neuro-electro-chemistry even if via a top-down causality mind-to-brain), then perhaps sometimes these visionary moments may sometimes be God-touched.