Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-01-15- 3:02 p.m.

Fuck Off, I Gave At the Office

I know that this is the least popular thing to say in the world, but I really can’t stand people who give to charity. Not one little bit. They suck. They’re unbearable. They make me want to grab them and shake them, just because they saw fit to give to the less fortunate. I’m really not a very good person, by the way.
Ok, truth be told, there may be somewhere out there, a small group of people who do give to charity whom I don’t abhor. I’m not really sure. Because, the thing about that small and theoretical group is that I’m totally unaware that they are giving to charity. Which is why I can put up with them.
There isn’t, of course, anything wrong with the act of giving to charity in itself. To the contrary, it is the most noble of ideas. People give to the less fortunate, even if they shouldn’t be so fortunate themselves. People volunteer their time helping out good causes. It’s nice, people giving freely of themselves to others. It warms my heart, until my blood is at a freaking boil and I want to hit someone.
Because it seems that the first rule of the charity club is… you will not shut up about the charity club. And you guessed what the second rule is to, didn’t ya? That’s right… you will not shut up about the charity club.
I feel sometimes like we’ve managed to turn social activism into a fashion statement. I see so many people now with t-shirts from pro-choice rallies or the Million Mom March or with captions like “I almost got drowned by the French Navy with Greenpeace and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” And it isn’t that any of these things aren’t a good thing, but stop hammering me with them already.
And the trouble is that the people who give are even louder than the people who act. Look at everyone who made donations following the attacks on 9/11. People were sincerely touched, and gave in record numbers to organizations like the Red Cross. But what happened when the Red Cross, which spent a not so small fortune from its own coffers to help before the donations rolled in, wanted to use some of the donations to help restock their funds for the next crisis? People went nuts. Dottie and Bob from Skokie, well, they wanted to make sure that every penny they gave went to help out that cute little moppet who talked about how daddy was a hero on the NBC Nightly News. They’d be damned if their $25 went to help out some poor starving bastard in Sierra Leone.
Go ahead and accuse me of being callous, I don’t mind. I don’t care if you think that I’m a prick or that I’m not nice. The truth is that I went to St. Vincent’s and gave blood, and then I went over to the armory in Murray Hill and volunteered to help families find out about their loved ones after 9/11, but I’m still not claiming to be a good or a moral person. And that is what drives me crazy about the charitable; it always seems like they’re just doing it to have something to lord over the rest of us.
I’ve noticed, as I’m sure that many of you have as well, that a lot of the Amazon Pay Pal buttons are showing up on some websites lately. It seems like a bit of an extension of the wishlist sometimes; people asking you to give them money because you like their site. A lot of places that I see that, I find it annoying, as I’m sure others do as well. But I’ve also noticed that some of the sites that don’t have the little Pay Pal button are mentioning that they don’t, and offering links to charitable sites if people want to give their money away. And that bothers me worse. Look, I don’t know anything about any of the people who run these sites. I’m not even the redheaded stepchild of the online community; I’m the bastard cousin from a third world nation who is sometimes a pen pal. But it seems to me that some of these sites may be run by people with small means, and that they might need donations to stay online, and if that makes it possible for thousands of users, more power to them. And if you don’t need contributions, then simply don’t accept them. Because you make me think you’re a fuckwit when you lord it over the rest of us that you’d rather give to the ASPCA than to yourself.
It seems almost like charity has become an excuse or a reprieve from being held accountable for even the most loathsome behavior. If Steve Jobs closes an Apple plant here in the U.S., and moves to Kuala Lumpur so that he can pay the people who install chips on Mac motherboards $0.17 an hour, no one notices if he gives 5000 computers to inner-city schools as he does it. Never mind that 5000 factory workers making a decent living wage could buy their own children computers, or pay enough in taxes to make the government able to increase the education budget. But this is how bootleggers like Joe Kennedy and robber barons like Andrew Carnegie live on in our memories as philanthropists, and a relatively minor gangster like Al Capone becomes the villain of countless TV shows.
I believe in not-for-profit groups, mind you. One of my life long goals has been to one day become a ‘card-carrying’ member of the ACLU. And trust me, when I have the forty bucks to spare, I’m going to do it. But when you try and cover up your own crap by saying you gave, I’m not going to listen anymore. Save it for someone who is a bigger sucker. I’ve decided that if giving is a virtue, it isn’t one that you can afford to buy.
Because the people who really give don’t need to tell me about it. True virtue doesn’t seek approval.

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If you want to make me
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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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