I'm not much of a donor, but occasionally when something makes me very mad or very sad, I'll write a check to assuage my conscience. This minor act always means I go on another mailing list, and I'm going to get junk mail, lots of it.
It's not so much the mail I mind, it's the waste. I know that nonprofits are perpetually short of funds, and I know they need to spend a little money to get more in return. But I'm a bad bet.
I
don't have a pet cause. There are so many, and they're all desperate,
and they all need everyone's help, now, now, now, or else children will
starve to death, and the seas will be choked with rotting whale flesh
(further delaying the food shipments to the starving children), and in
the meantime while everyone's freaking out about the dead whale stench,
evil people will take advantage of the distraction to torch the
Constitution,
and we'll all be forcibly impregnated and put in camps for making
monkey faces while mocking Dear Leader, just because.
We're
living in fucked-up times, I know. Where do you even start? So I'm
trying to spread the love (albeit very thinly), and as a result, my
donations are almost always a one-shot deal.
To my reckoning, one reproductive rights organization has spent the thirty bucks I sent them five years ago exclusively on postage to get me to give them something else.
Also, I really didn't want or need a certain disease research society to send me self-adhesive address labels. (Especially not ones with Ziggy on them. Come on, guys.)
And while I certainly appreciate the work this particular international aid group does, I would really have preferred they had used the, say, fifty cents it took to send me a two-color fold-out 8 1/2 x 11" brochure today on a few water purifcation tablets for tsunami orphans instead.
I don't mean to sound churlish. It just makes me sad that my pathetic, infrequent little gifts are spent on leaflets and postage-paid envelopes instead of, you know, helping people. I wish there were a way to tell them that I'll call them.