A Small Red Pin

A while ago, I wrote a post defending local churches for the charitable works they do. A lot of my first hand experience with this was working a food pantry during the pandemic. The church that runs it has a growing number of campuses in the area, and they're an "all are welcome" crowd. Their desire for expansion is a bit too ambitious for my taste, but they're rooted in a good idea. On days we offered service, as they waited in rows of parked cars, the clients would self segregate by language, and there was always a significant Russian group. One grandmother in particular was fond of bringing us stuffed cabbage made from ingredients she got from the pantry. Those were my favorite days. When the war in Ukraine hit, there was a huge influx of Russian speaking Ukrainians, and it was amazing to watch the way they were brought into the fold. One man in particular, one of the long-time Russian clients, would constantly walk up and down the rows of cars looking for new arrivals, trying to connect them with the community. This man came to me with a problem one day. He had to dispute a charge on his credit card from being scammed on an Airbnb, somewhere in Eastern Europe while on holiday. He needed to send a letter to the credit card company and he needed help getting it written in English. After a few hours of figuring out what the story actually was and figuring out what the credit card company needed to see, I wrote the letter for him. Due to my parenting time schedule, I was only able to volunteer there every other week. When my next shift arrived, he found me, annoyed that he hadn't seen me the week before. For all his kindness, he was often an abrasive character, a big part of why I loved him so much. He was annoyed that he had brought me a gift and that I wasn't there to receive it. I told him to bring it in another two weeks, that would be the next time I would see him. When that day arrived, he handed me a small pin with some phrase written on it in Russian. He said that since under communism people weren't able to be directly rewarded for working harder than their comrades, the authorities had to devise some workarounds. When he'd wear this pin to the shops, he was able to cut the line. He was offered better cuts of meat. He was treated with deference. When I got home, I held it up to Google Lense, and it translated into something like "good citizen award." The existence of such tokens was a revelation to me. I think one of the most valid arguments against communism is the fact that you will not get an equal amount of labor out of people, and that offering everyone equal compensation disincentivizes the pursuit of excellence. The notion that working harder should translate into being rewarded more (even if this notion is a mythical one) seems foundational to how we practice capitalism in the West. That this foundational aspect of the diametrically opposed system of socioeconomic governance had to be recognized to some degree under communism should inspire us to be less locked into our preferred ideologies. We have not yet written a system that accounts for all aspects of our humanity.