Thursday, December 30, 2004 |
16:22 - On generosity and stinginess
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Regarding the tsunamis and the relief effort I don't have a lot to say. Well, no, that's not true. There's plenty I could say, but I think I'd be happier with myself if I abstained. It'd certainly make for a more pleasant experience looking back on this period from six months in the future.
What I mean is this: there's an awful lot of temptation out there to treat the quake/tsunami disaster as an opportunity to "prove", through innumerable little acts of one-upmanship, that so-and-so is more generous with his largesse than such-and-who else. With the Amazon.com/Red Cross donation box having taken in over $6 million all by itself (and the numbers are still climbing), and with dozens of other charitable organizations collecting money, it's easy to use that to demonstrate how great the charitable spirit of the private American citizen is as opposed to what the governments of other countries—or even our own—has pledged. Similarly, one could point out that Microsoft has nothing on its home page to correspond to what Apple has posted in light of the occasion, for all the good that would do. (UPDATE: Now they do.) Personally? I don't think it accomplishes much. It only serves to turn this whole thing into a less-stingy-than-thou game, which is a really awful thing to be doing right about now.
There are those who will smirk at the fact that the initial US Government donation was about $15 million, followed by that UN official's remark that (depending on whose side of the story you believe) "prompted" us to raise the offer to $35 million, as though the amount we're willing to donate depends only on how much green we have to feed into the little slot machine to get little dings of approval from the nodding heads lined up in the General Assembly. The sainted WaPo has weighed in on the nerve of President Bush to be vacationing at this time of year, instead of personally ripping off his suit coat and Santa hat and wading into the surf to save drowning victims. MoveOn.org has already sent out e-mails to its members urging them to write to Bush to express their outrage at his uncaringness and pigheadedness, helpfully pointing out that we're burning through $35 million a day in Iraq. (Surely we could just, I don't know, put all our soldiers in a big icebox to keep them out of trouble for 24 hours, and give the money to the Red Cross instead? Then, hey, Iraq would have peace for a day!) And it's easy to point out outrages and shameful cover-ups and criminal pettiness on the part of the usual suspects. But you know what? This is like watching the live coverage of the events of September 11th, seeing the headlines crawl across the bottom of the screen, and mumbling to yourself about what you might like to have for lunch.
Is it too much to imagine, for instance, that the US and other countries have contributed increasing amounts of aid because it wasn't so very many hours ago that we thought the tsunamis had killed only ("only") ten thousand people? The understanding of the scale of this event has rolled over us with as much deliberate and smothering weight as the waves themselves did on those beaches—and it's taken a while for it to sink in. It's going to get worse still as "missing" figures continue to be added to the casualties. There is no human shame in becoming slowly, painfully more aware of how big a thing this is and how much we ought to contribute. This isn't about thinking of ourselves as emotional whores whose sympathies can be bought with a sufficiently high body count. This is about the slow realization of something that's going to be affecting all of us, and an opportunity to put aside the temptation to compete and backbite, and see what we can do to fix the problem—or at least mitigate it a bit.
If there's anything I've come to appreciate in recent years, it's that the decisions that are made in this world, all the way on up to the top of our highest institutions, are made by human beings, with the same mental chemistry and human motivations and provincial family concerns and stubbly chins and lack of sleep and worries about the very real future that every one of us has. The people who came up with the $35 million figure are better qualified to account for it and how they arrived at it than any of the pundits who style themselves experts in everything they ever read a headline about, and this is one of those times when the speed of decisions matters. There will be ample time to criticize our respective collective generosities and measure everyone's charity dicks against each other in the future, so let's wait until then. Better yet, let's not do it at all.
UPDATE: Oh, and incidentally, the Evil Corporations have all just joined the party. KCBS just rattled off a list of names including Pfizer, the Citi Group, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Meyers-Squibb, and about ten others, each of whom was donating $3 to $10 million. That just about leaves any government's pledge in the dust, and makes even the Amazon.com thing seem like small change.
For what it's worth.
UPDATE: Here's the list. And Tim Blair has a roundup of contributions and fundraising efforts from all over the world, including the latest news and anecdotal stories of heroism.
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