gullybogan

Dear Reader,

That’s it. I’m over those pop shops in shopping centres offering me the chance to assuage my first world guilt by sponsoring a third world child.

My World Vision™ is not for global human poverty to be band-aided one child at a time by western middle class guilt. Not anymore.

This arvo, i was walking through a shopping centre, saturnalia shopping, and i found myself alongside one of these contemptible pop shops, one that was staffed by a rather ironically chubby girl who was taking a break from being exploitatively personable to passing strangers.

Another girl, presumably an actual friend of hers (as opposed to the way she would pretend that she was friends with those passing strangers), was standing there, smiling knowingly down at her as she said, no doubt to cover an awkward silence in the conversation, « So, sold many children today? »

See, you don’t sell children. Selling children – again, ironically – lacks a thing called “compassion”, and also something called “dignity”.

When we were all just little, and there was nothing that we could do about things, this band-aid approach seemed like a good idea. You know, a subversive action we could all take until something proper happened.

Well, now i’m of the age where i’m in charge of the world, and i get to make the adult decisions.

And the band-aid’s coming off.

Sponsoring a child in a village somewhere is like turning off a lightbulb to stop global warming: it makes a haitch of a difference to the lightbulb, sure, but it doesn’t do anything to solve the bigger problem.

And, in fact, since the well-meaning person turning off the lightbulb thinks that turning it off *is* stopping global warming, they feel like that’s enough, their part done.

Newsbreak: If you want to stop global warming, you have to turn off your fridge, not just a lightbulb. Oh, and do a few other things too, that i won’t go into here, in this rant.

These pop shops exploit our sense of compassion. They do it to fund livelihoods/pinmoney for the ppl who run/staff the charities. Some money trickles through to the needy, sure, but also there are large and air conditioned offices for organisations like World Vision™ that don’t come for free, and i don’t expect that the money that funds them falls from the sky.

I have compassion for my fellow beings on this planet, and i’m sickened by the way that that compassion is being exploited.

What i want is for there to be something actually happen now. Something radical. Something turn-off-the-fridge.

These charity-funded charities have to stop selling children to guilty saturnalia shoppers, and start taking on governments, the way the Sea Shepherds take on whalers.

Or we do.

We don’t need no steenking badges to take on the government.

Twentysome years ago, now-Sir Bob Geldof told us we could (or should) feed the world. What happened to that?

My big hope is that now that Capitalism has collapsed, maybe there is a chance that we *can* feed the world.

Maybe not this excessmas. But next year, for sure.

Once the collapse of Capitalism has really taken hold.

But if we haven’t done it by next excessmas, it’ll be too late.

The best way to take off a band-aid is quickly.

Yours,
Gullybogan