Do we need public doles?

Was not away but too preoccupied with my thoughts to write..when things upset me more than usual it makes me physically ill or atleast not able to express myself. I have been reading the Indus Saga by Aitzaz Ahsan, which the author was very kind to autograph for me, since I have made the ommission of not reading it till now, which is bad but not surprising since i have not done a lot of what i should have done..The book is indeed absorbing and thought provoking. It brings up again and again the static nature of our societal existence. Ours is a society designed to maintain the status quo and make sure that no body gets out of the shackles that we put them in. It is a landscape where each day rises and sets like the one before and the individual feels that nothing can change, nothing will change. This is why our people are listless and without hope of a better tomorrow through their own efforts. They just think something might change through divine intervention, but not with their own hands. For centuries we have existed like this. This state of affairs has given us a present where mothers committ suicide because they cannot pay for the fees of their children. I cannot but forget the incident in Makkah colony,Lahore in 2008, where a young woman killed herself because she was dejected at having no money for her children's education. I was a young Assistant Commissioner then, and the then PM was to arrive and visit the bereaved family. The streets had been cleaned because of the VIP visit. I entered the small door of a building where the family of four lived in one room. the lady had to arrange her kitchen things in the corridor outside the room, which was a thoroughfare for the other residents of the building. I read her last letter before her death, in which she had written why she was dying, but had written ,curiously, that she wanted to be buried next to her mother, and that nobody should have any objection to that. Needless to say, it was an allusion to her spouse and in laws, which showed her inner loneliness and feeling of helplessness even at the moment of death. I could never forget that room, the children and the kitchen things in the corridor. I have seen countless scenes of helplessness and despair on the faces of common men and women. Years have passed, i have tried on different positions to help as many poeple as i could, but each day I wake up to the feeling of not being equal to the gigantic task, of the dire and pressing need for social reform. who is going to do that and how, how are the religious and community elders going to react to it if some section of society rises up to take its rights, as it should, I do not know. The government, tries to give out money to solve these problems. They think giving alms, the traiditional way of helping the poor, will keep working. But it is not working. Pakistan is one of the most charitable nations in the world they say. But faced with the current problems, it is not working. The only way is to empower people to be equal, to give them means to earn and help themselves.It is true that we take money through taxes and spend on poor, but we should spend on systems rather than cash schemes. All these different schemes that are being launched and the financial support they offer are going to be swallowed up by the parasitical structure of our society, where the earning members are hostages to the demands of their families. they will get votes, but not solve the real issues of our society. Our young people are without idealism and dreams because they know that in their lives, not much will change despite their hard work. What we require is not more waseela e haq, but an inspired and motivated nation with more awareness of their rights as individuals and systems to protect those rights. We need more social justice, more protection of the individual. For example, centres for battered women rather than jail like daarul amaan where one can only enter through the court. The society rejects the individual and supports the imposition of collective will over that of a person. We need laws that are enforced. We need equal opportunities, not alms. If you give alms, all you get are beggars. We end up begging at the national level, because people are not self sufficient at the grassroots level and live mostly on the charity of family or strangers or the government and cannot pay taxes to the government. It is a joke not to be able to control prices and to be content at having "Sasta Bazaars"We need an enabling environment, not more public doles.