On The Perversion of Charity

It’s sad – I remember not too long ago a girl wanted people to pay off her credit card bill. So she appealed to people via her website. And she got her money – and a lot of publicity as well.

But I wonder how many truly needy charities and people missed out on a few dollars because someone couldn’t control her spending habits.

This comes up right now because it seems the theme of the past week has been ‘I’ve got problems, help me’:

• One person offers a report – at the end of his sales letter, he mentions that he’s sick, and may not be able to write something for awhile – SO GET IT WHILE YOU CAN.
• Another report from a well-known business person mentions a friend who found a dog – and now he’s selling a report to help out the dog.
• Sometimes the reverse seems to work out as well – not too long ago, a person involved in a business forum had a serious accident, in which his wife was killed. People were concerned and helping out a bit – and then someone complained. THAT got the ball rolling, so much so I started wondering if this ‘enemy’ might actually have been a friend using a bit of reverse psychology.

So where’s the bad in all this? Because the bad ones can overshadow the good – and in the end is we get callous to everything and everyone.

Remember your first Nigerian email? Could somebody really need help getting their money out of an evil dictatorship? Now we look at them and laugh (if we even look at all) – and possibly ignore other, more reasonable pleas for help.

Or worse yet, give in when we shouldn’t, and get burned. A few years ago, a coworker sent me an email with instructions to contact this cancer-stricken child, who was trying to get into the Guiness Book of Records for most emails received. I refused – no doubt coming across badly.

Of course, there was no child, and news agencies later reported it as the greatest email address harvesting scam to date, by people conned into doing the ‘right thing’.

So my advice – start a policy. Avoid any and all online attempts to get you to be charitable. Find an off-Internet charity you feel does good work. And give generously to it.

Over time, the scams and gimmicks people use to get money force me to just ignore all requests, no matter how genuine they seem – because I’ve learned that while there are many people truly hurting, there are many more that simply know how to appear to hurt.

This entry was posted Thursday, April 21st, 2005, and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. Comments are closed. Pings are open. You can use this trackback URl.

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