May 25th, 2009
I'm starting to see a pattern. I'm still feeling my way to the words, so I may ramble on about it for a few days yet before I exactly nail it.
I hope that you, my multi-divisional army of Gentle Readers, can bear with me.
Right, so I used to feel a panic when I watched certain television appeals for my charitable donation. Let's take the case of a well-known actor or actress, standing in the war-torn or drought-stricken African landscape; crying, destitute, dying children with that hollowed-out look to them stooped next to the actor (oh, say, Sally Struthers or Lorne Greene) while we were told the absolute necessity of our few pennies a day in order to ensure their better livelihood ... their very existence.
You still see the televised appeals, of course, but not with the same directness and appeal that the ones of yesteryear had. Why is that? Are we "getting through" to the sick, starving, and dying? Hardly. It's just that the venues provided us to contribute have tarnished reputations (at best) or have been exposed as downright fraud. A couple of bucks to most of those old-time charities meant the continued of existence of those charities and little more else. A few token pennies on the dollar actually got to the recipient.
It seemed that the more strident the appeal to us, the less reputable the charity. I am sure that many charities delivered a significant portion of our contribution to the targeted people, (maybe as much as 50% even) but it's hard to distinguish, hard to know where the money is going, and we soon lost interested in throwing money into a black hole without a glimmer of what dimension it was coming out in.
I used to watch Lorne Greene and Sally Struthers, even today I hear the words of Bono and others, with the guilt and panic feelings descending on me. That sense of obligation and urgency being pressed onto me unsettled me in the past. Often almost moved me to action—which was the intention. I once committed to a donation for the 1985 concert Live Aid (I was a teenager, so it wasn't a princely sum). Probably, if I'd had more money back then I'd have contributed to more causes, with the result of only lining the pockets of the people working for those "charities".
But since hearing about how some charities get as little as 2% of my money to the people I'd think it's intended for, I would never donate to a televised appeal. I've since learned that the more people advertise and market the need for my help and the more people who instil in me a panic and urgency to save "these poor people" (whoever those people may be) the more I can be sure that it is not really about the people in distress, but about a call for my money to keep the charities alive and thriving on it.
And those are the charities who control the money once it reaches its target. As has been said by many, sometimes attributed to Bono (but he didn't say it first), it is corruption—not famine or disease—that threatens the poorest nations. And we have very few ways of knowing if our contributed money has done any good at all.
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