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Gonzo Charity - Mar 19, 2004 - Printable Version
- A "Brief" Overview
by Mark Faulk
For centuries, society has tried to help those who are in need. Well, actually, half of society has tried to rape and plunder those who are in need (the "survival of the fittest" approach), while the other half has tried to help. Okay, half of the other half has been pretty much preoccupied with indulging their own hedonistic whims, and just don't have the time to deal with other people's problems, although they certainly sympathize with the poor souls. But, the remaining 25% have gone out of their way to help the "less fortunate". Granted, two-thirds of those are the less fortunate, and would technically be on the receiving end of these charitable acts, but they would help others if they had the means, which they don't so it's really a moot point. That would be like saying "If I had a billion dollars, I would build a giant spaceship and take all my friends to Mars, and have a totally outrageous birthday party". Since I have squat, what's the point of even daydreaming about it? But what if I did? Everyone would want to be my friend, and I could charge them big money just to hang around me, and eventually, I would have my billion dollars, build my rocketship, and I could take off for Mars and leave those losers behind. Buh-bye, now. But I digress. This is a serious article, about serious stuff. Serious, charity-type stuff. Which is important, a lot more important than building a rocketship to Mars. Or is it? Hmmm............Yeah, I guess it is.*
Let's see, where was I? Oh, yeah, for centuries, eight and a third percent of society has tried to help those who are in need. They give freely of their time, money, and resources in an effort to make the world a little better place, and in the process, they also make the rest of us look like stingy cheapskate bastards. I hate that, 'cause, like, I'm just trying to make a buck like everyone else, and it sucks when I have to feel guilty about buying a six pack and renting a movie just because you could buy enough beer and rent enough movies to entertain an entire village in some hard-to-pronounce third-world country for a month with that same amount of money (unless, of course, you bought cheap generic "BEER" and used a coupon to get a free Favorites video, in which case, have a nice guilt free evening with your crappy-tasting beer and lousy copy of the original version of "King Kong").
But look at it this way. If those people (we'll call them "Givers", for the sake of clarification), if it wasn't for the Givers, then the rest of us (commonly referred to as "Takers", or worse), would feel really guilty because no one would be helping those in need. So we really do owe them a major debt of gratitude, and even if we just get off our lazy asses long enough to donate a few measly dollars to their efforts, at least we can justify our selfish existences, and maybe catch an occasional guiltfree night of sleep without the aid of enough expensive sleeping pills to render an entire third-world village unconscious for an entire month. Sleep, my pretty, sleep.
It seems to me that "charitable giving" can be divided into two categories. The first category, the "Giant Corporate Givers", have so much money that they have to give huge amounts of money** to "Giant Corporate Charities", just so they can reduce their tax bills, and by association, their sleeping pill bills. The "Giant Corporate Charities", in turn, spend the vast majority of that money on Giant Corporate Charity Executive salaries, and hire Giant Charity Staffs, who then hand out a few free Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys to those in need. Sort of a "trickle-down economics" version of giving. And, as with all economic plans that begin with the phrase "trickle-down", the key word is of course "trickle". Now, I'm not implying that all Giant Corporations are greedy, or that the majority of Giant Corporate Charities are actually just Giant Corporations disguised as non-profit organizations, but do you really think they got to be giant in the first place by actually giving away huge amounts of money***?
But, once again, I digress. This is hardly turning out to be a "brief overview" of anything, much less Gonzo charity. Do I even have a point here? Yes, I do, and here it is: The best, and usually the most effective, charitable giving is done by very small organizations, often hatched by a couple of people staying up late, lamenting the lack of compassion in the world. Unburdened by corporate shackles, they often end up bringing positive change into their neighborhood, community, or the world at large. They take the viewpoint that a thousand small contributions is always more effective than one giant, all encompassing bureaucratic quagmire tax deductible monstrosity of a charity.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
In the next few months, I hope to introduce readers here to a few of those "Gonzo Charities", and maybe even inspire you to get off your barcalounger and do something for your neighborhood, community, or world. Or at least clean up the crap in your own front yard. Hey, everyone has to start somewhere.
*footnote: As it turns out, since this article was written recent events and a minimal amount of research has revealed that charitable giving is not as important as building a spaceship to Mars after all. My mistake.
**another footnote: In this context, the use of the phrase "huge amounts of money" is relative. While to these Giant Corporations the amount of money they give is barely enough to cover the cost of a corporate write-off business lunch, to most of us small-time Takers, it would constitute a "huge amount of money". I used the small-time Taker definition of "huge amounts of money" simply because I assumed that any Giant Corporate Executives who happened to stumble upon this article quit reading long ago, and that the only ones still reading by now, are, in all probability, small-time (no offense to you, the Reader, intended).
***yet another footnote: Okay, this time the use of the phrase "huge amounts of money" really does refer to huge amounts of money, even by Giant Corporation standards, and should not be confused with the small-time Takers' definition of "huge amounts of money" mentioned earlier in this article. Sorry about any confusion that this discrepancy may have caused.
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