Charity

The United Way is Evil.

When I was seven or eight, the United Way 'came' to my school and hit us all up for the sweet sweet cash. 

Maybe my teacher did it wrong, or maybe I simply misunderstood, but I didn't exactly bring cash from my parents to pay them off, so the few coins I stuffed in the little manila envelope came from my own very meagre allowance.   So instead of getting generic 'feel goods' from my giving, I instead resented the adults for asking me, a small child, for money.  I was, after all, only a year or two removed from saving up for weeks to buy a three dollar box of legos, and my allowance hadn't changed in the interval.

Now that I reflect back on it, it is clear that the intent of these yearly exercises are to build a habit of reflexive giving, unhampered by thought, and starting with other people's money.  You don't ask seven and eight year olds for their allowance money if you want to create a lifetime giver.  I can't see how this is anything other than extremely gentle extortion. If the parents don't provide the (to them negligible) donation, its the kids who feel the pressure to contribute and the shame of failure. Most parents would happily sacrifice a dollar to two, even way back in the early 80's, to save their kids that sort of trouble... especially in the name of a good cause.

But since it WAS my money that I was giving up I always had to wonder about it.  I mean, when they wanted me to buy books from the book club, I got something for my money, but what happened to the change that I stuffed in those little envelopes?  For all I knew (back then) the teacher kept it for herself. 

Oh, I knew it was supposedly going to Africa to feed starving, underprivileged children (but I ask you? What was I in those days?), but how did I KNOW that?  Year after year things seemed to get worse in Africa, not better. Year after year, more and more charities seemed to spring up, demanding more money, more effort.  My cartoons were interrupted by please for 'For as little as ten cents a day'... or whatever the going rate was back then... and by Sally Struthers, looking like she'd eaten all the food donated before going on the air demanding more, for the children.

I must not have been the only one asking 'how do I know that my donations are actually going to underprivileged kids?', because it wasn't long before they started sponsorship packs, where the one kid you were paying for would send you pictures and letters and shit. 

This was, to my young eyes, a monumental failure of an idea. 

As 'proof' went it seemed entirely inadequate to me, to easy to fake in the short run.  As a charitable idea it was lacking as well. At what point do you stop paying for this 'one child'?  

I had a dozen ill formed ideas about how silly it all was, but I simply shrugged and moved on.  For decades the only charity I have given is to bell ringers at christmas from the Salvation Army, and of my time and labor for local causes. 

Now, courtesy of Ace of Spades comes a story that warms the dark tarry cockles of my shriveled and useless heart. 

For those of you too busy to click a link, let me sum up: This journalist from... Australia?... has been sponsoring a child for ten years and in ten years the quality of the letters and art haven't improved at all, and actually gone down hill. A seventeen year old child is still drawing simple, off-kilter boxes and triangles with crayon to represent a house.

What I like is the never-stated subtext... that it is in fact unstated subtext... that there is some sort of fraud going on here.  The closest the story gets is to ask 'Hmm... that's curious', and a brief reference to another journalist who actually travelled to Africa (country unknown) to find the child she had been sponsoring, only to find said child had only dealt with the Charity* when they'd taken her photograph.

But even in that case, the term 'fraud' is never used, never alluded too. At worst, the Charity* merely used the money to do better good communally than the individual promise they offered.

Umm...

That's a lie. That's fraud. If I had sent several hundred (thousand?) dollars to support some named individual, I would expect THAT INDIVIDUAL to have received the money, or at least the goods and services it bought. Not some generic 'community' that in turn may or may not include said individual. 

By way of analogy: If I wanted to get my cousin Tim** off the streets of Detroit, so I sent him a few hundred bucks, I would be extraordinarily peeved to find that instead of going to Tim, the city of Detroit took that money for 'improvements' for 'all the Tims of the city'. 

I didn't send Detroit the money, did I? I sent it to Tim.  It doesn't matter if Tim is actual family, or just a name and a photograph that tugged at my heart from a book or commercial. I sent the fucking money to fucking TIM, and TIM better be the one who gets it!

But we musn't question the saintly nature of our charitable organizations. 

Bullshit. 

I've got a lot to say on charities, but instead I'll let you ponder this one case, and what no one seems to be saying... at least no one official, and not out loud. 

* by this I mean the organization World Vision, the charity involved in this case, and somewhat facetiously the idea of these groups being actual charities. They are large businesses with excellent PR, and what they sell are remittances. 

** I do not have a cousin named Tim that I am aware of. Likewise, while I have a number of friends from Detroit, I don't actually know anyone that lives there. If I did, the last fucking thing I'd do is send them money. I'd rather drive to Detroit in a truck and help them move out than send them ten bucks for gas.