How often do you hear of someone “giving back” to the community? Or a school? or... something? You hear it a lot. At least I do. And I find it annoying. Of course I do. I have to be annoyed about something. So what's annoying about this seemingly innocent phrase?
There's a 2017 article published by the American Enterprise Institute which sums it up perfectly: “Why ‘giving Back’ Is a Fundamentally Flawed and Objectionable Concept — It Falsely Implies There Was a ‘taking First.'” And that's my point. You frequently hear about a wealth philanthropist who is “giving back,” when they really mean “giving.” It implies that a wealthy person made his or her money on the backs of others, after taking from them. And usually, that's not the case.
You hear people, when asked why they're “giving back,” that they've been so blessed with good fortune, they think it's their moral duty to “give back” even if they don't owe anyone anything. A woman named Barb, wrote something on her website (HappySimple-dot-com) in 2015 something that describes my feelings exactly: “On the surface, it looks like good advice. But if you really look at that phrase, it actually sets up a separation between me and the community. As though the community is some form of bank account upon which you draw until gratitude or guilt or fear that you’ve depleted it too much causes you to decide to put a little back.”
We don't take from the community and then give back. We are the community. It's like the picture that made the rounds on Facebook years ago. It showed a line of cars, on a highway, in bumper-to-bumper traffic. It was captioned, “You're not stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic.” Yup. I believe the phrase “give back” is designed to set up a sense of guilt – shaming people into believing they're returning a favor.
If I donate to a cause, I'm not giving back, I'm simply giving. And while we're on the subject of giving, there's another annoying usage that has, for some reason, become ubiquitous in the past few years: “gifting.” As in, “the university was gifted a million dollars by a wealthy benefactor.”
But we already have a perfectly good word for that: giving. I've always thought that “gift” is a noun, and “giving” is a verb. So why the insistence on “gifting?”
So now that I have gifted you my wisdom, you can give back to me anytime. Thank you.