The content of this post may seem cruel and callous. Nevertheless, it irks me the frequency at which I am asked to donate money to charity. This is happening inside and outside of the workplace. Last week, in return for donating $10 to "Friends Feeding Families", I was allowed to wear jeans on Friday. This week is a double whammy. I arrived at work this morning to find a post card with some chocolate gold coins announcing the annual giving campaign is under way. About an hour later, I received an email from my collegue asking me to sponsor her in a marathon she's running for the Leukemian & Lymphoma Society.
Two years ago I practically got into a brawl with a co-worker because I refused to donate $5 in support of the National Breast Cancer Foundation. I didn't know she was a breast cancer survivor. She immediately took my lack of donation personally and scathingly gave me a piece of her mind. "But what about all of the people who have died of breast cancer!" "It's not that I don't have compassion, but my resources are limited, I can't keep up with all the organizations that need my money" I retorted. Little did she know that earlier that week I promised $65 to my friend who decided to walk for the National Kidney Foundation. The next day the breast cancer survivor apologized to me after receiving two flyers in the mail from charities.
Then there are the myriad fundraisers that I am subjected to at the supermarket. As a citizen, I should be able to exit a supermarket freely without feeling guilty because I didn't donate money to the local cheerleading squad's plight to go to the cheerleading championships.
I am not a complete ogre. I adopted an endangered animal through the World Wildlife Federation last year on behalf of my boyfriend for Christmas. That cost me $50. I plan on adopting again this year. I donated $25 to the National Wildlife Federation to save the animals of the BP oil spill. I even crusaded at work to start a fundraiser for The National Wildlife Federation and my manager never got back to me. I donated $10 to the Haiti Earthquake Relief effort. I donated clothes to the Dress for Success Organization. Over the summer I donated my time to the Hale Reservation Clean Up and the Boston Food Bank.
There really is only so much one person can do.
2 comments:
Good for you.
And it's far better to say what you think outright, than to keep it to yourself, and fume about it internally.
I've been thinking a bit more about this question...
People who collect for charity often have an air of Christian self-righteousness about them. That devalues the causes they promote.
People often don't bother to ask why afflictions exist. All they know is that they are going to put things right. But why does God make bad things? Is God incompetent, and do these people know better than God?
There is the story of Moses and Khdir. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khidr#Quranic_narrative
The idea is of that story is that bad things exist for a reason. What is actually 'wrong' is our inability to understand why they exist.
Some people believe that you can't have good in the world without evil; and you can't have evil without good. Good and evil are balanced. If you go out of your way to do something good, then, somehow, evil is also created, perhaps elsewhere in the world.
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