One of my Opinions Columns:
The other day I saw an interesting ad on TV. It asked the question, “What would you do with $1?” At first, I thought this was kind of an odd question. After all, usually when people ask you what you would do with a certain amount of money, the amount is bigger, like for instance, “What would you do with $1 million?”
After posing the question, the ad went through various things you could buy with $1, such as a cup of coffee, a couple doughnuts, less than a gallon of gasoline, etc. The point was that there really wasn’t much you could buy with it. However, the ad said, if you were to give $1 to their charity everyday, they could spend it on all sorts of useful things to help people in under-developed countries such as cleaning the drinking water supply, helping to establish agriculture, improving education, and so on. The basic message of the ad seemed to be all you had to do was pay $1 a day and look at all the great things you could give to the world through our charity.
My reaction to this particular ad was somewhat mixed. On one hand, I was very happy to see this charity existed and that it did such great things for the world and encouraged other people to support their programs so they could continually expand them and do even more great things. But at the same time, I also felt it was somewhat of a sad testament to our society that the only way to get people to do the right thing is to make it seem trendy and easy.
This wasn’t the first time I’d seen an ad of this type either, as I’m sure we’re all used to seeing those pictures of starving kids on TV, along with charity workers trying to guilt us into giving them money. Sometimes it almost seems like the charitable groups are no better than big corporations, which advertise to try to get us to buy their product so they can remain profitable. The only difference, of course, is that here the “product” is the ability to feel good about yourself, as opposed to being something tangible. Sometimes people will even give to charities such as the United Way when they don’t even know what the charity does, because they don’t really care. They just want to be able to say “I gave something to charity” so that they can feel less guilty about having money.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to say that I dislike the idea of charities, and I would never discourage anybody from giving to the less fortunate. I do so myself all the time. But if we really want to help out the individuals or groups we say we do, I think we need to do more than just call an “800” number and give someone our credit card info. We need to really look into exactly what people need and ask ourselves if we are giving it to them. We need to ask ourselves questions about every product we buy, such as “Do I know that this was made and sold under good working conditions?” We need to vote for politicians who advocate social programs and paying off our debts over ones that merely will serve our own self-interest with tax cuts and the like.
I’m not going to claim to have all the answers on how to help those less fortunate, because I don’t. But the one thing I do know is the only way to really serve anybody is to get to know them and find out what they need, rather than just throw money at them. Ever since Sept. 11, the idea of volunteering and supporting charity has become trendier than ever, and with Christmas on the way it will probably continue to do so. All of that is well and good, but I still encourage all of you to really think about and try to learn about those you say you want to help. Continually ask yourself if what you are doing is really the best thing you can do for the causes you claim to support. But be warned, it might cost you more than $1.
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