Today I woke up and read about armband trends.
Living in Germany, I’m apparently fully cut off from these trends, because I had to learn about “Live Strong” via “Live Wrong” (via mefi — it took me reading quite a few comments there to even understand what it was all about). But as goofy and tired as parodies like livewrong.net are, that’s not what I’m here to blather on about.
Since the tsunami, it seems to me that a lot of people have taken a second look at their pocketbooks and found that it doesn’t really hurt to give to charity. On the other side, lots of charities both preexisting and new are trying to capitalize on this phenomenon. And nobody can really criticize the (real) charities for doing so.
But if you ask me, the main reason people are feeling so good about giving to charities is that it gives away the responsibility of actual action to others. (And yes, I include myself in this; I gave to tsunami charities.) It’s all too easy to look at the state of the world today and feel frustrated and unable to do anything about what I would call a downward spiral, and a time-to-money conversion is a nice, easy out.
It’s way better than doing absolutely nothing, of course, but I wish that I could manage to integrate political activism into my life instead. Then again, so many people I know keep telling me that political activists who stick their heads up are getting them chopped off, thanks to modern surveillance and information concentration techniques. Maybe it’s all just PR creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, but some reports make me antsy all the same…
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