posted on October 29, 2003 06:43:38 PM new
Time to give,,,,and give WE shall.....People have lost,,,,,,more than I can say,,,,,RED CROSS, but be sure to give it to the "California Fire victims ONLY Fund!!!!! NOT the General fund.....Remember the 911 fiasco.....e mail pay pal and get them to make it easier to get to this specific Donation cause. Give as much as you can from your auctions. We that are comfortable can NOT imagine their loss.
posted on October 29, 2003 07:22:30 PM new
After 9/11, I have to admit I am very hesitant to make donations for these funds. I donated then, as did most of us. I then found out United Way was giving money to organizations that I would never support, while the families were not getting their money. The Red Cross seems worthy to me and I will continue to support them, but I am wary about many of the organizations out there.
posted on October 29, 2003 09:23:00 PM new
AHC - no one is more hesitant thatn us in the San Diego that had a major controversy here with the Red Cross. The area leader refused to step down when asked and had to fired after other fire victims forced an audit because nothing was getting to them. The new head has been falling all over herself assuring people in the area that 100% of all donations will go to fire victims.
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If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
posted on October 29, 2003 11:24:39 PM new
While I can appreciate, on the one hand, the urge to contribute for these victims, I must say that I am inured to the whole disaster-of-the-day donation compulsion.
Not so much that these ad hoc efforts are inevitably inefficient and wasteful..its rather how circumspect the underlying and highly arbitrary motives behind the such giving is.
It seems that this type of charity is driven by and in proportion to the spectacle of the attendant disaster; be it this fire or 9/11 or whatever.
The real question is how we come to the decision to give to these victims and not to others whose lives have been less dramatically destroyed but destroyed nevertheless. Fact is, we're surrounded by these "Little Murders", (as Jules Feiffer might put it) and each of us chooses, more often than not, to give based upon how much we identify with the victim(s).
We are all moral relativists in this regard.
We weigh the opportunity, we simply choose to acknowledge some and ignore others.
We step over the single prostrate figure on the street without a second thought.Better there would be a hundred or so for his sake, all on the same street, qualifying as a minor spectacle with maybe a chance for a sound-bite on the news and the inevitable phone number for contributions.
Perhaps a disaster proves the loss is genuine...fires burning, houses asunder and the inevitable image of the stricken among the ruins staring blindly at what once was.
I suppose its our primitive hearts at work, donating not so much to mitigate the loss of everything dear, but really to assuage the gods with tokens of appeasement. But all for naught as the gods are, by their very nature angry and nothing seems to touch their hearts near so much as ours.
"I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same from them."- John Wayne/The Shootist"(from the novel by Glendon Swarthout)
