Wednesday, May 26, 2010
By the Way I Am the Righteousest!
Posted by Chris Wage on Wed, May 26, 2010 at 3:44 PM
Betsy touched on something recently that's been gnawing at me, but I haven't had the time or motivation to address it until now. It involves something that has been a longstanding pet peeve of mine — though one that I've slowly had to come to terms with as being slightly misplaced.
This pet peeve has to do with the phenomenon of what I like to refer (referred?) to as "faux-charity" — the sort of good deeds that allow us to contribute to the less fortunate in some form or fashion, but without significantly sacrificing the posh middle/upper-class lifestyle to which we (if you'll allow me some crude approximation of PITW's readership demographics) have become accustomed. Or, in more egregious cases, by actually flaunting it. Steeplechase is a good example of this. Yes, we put on our finest hats and seersucker and spend a ton of money to go get raucously drunk, watch horses race around a track and get a brutal sunburn. It's rough, yes — but you see, it's for the children!
This sort of faux-charity runs the gamut from your average small-time bake sale on up to various black-tie soirees. They're nice and all, but It was never clear to me why, if you wanted to raise funds for something, you couldn't just ... give money. Or volunteer. Eat Out for Nashville was something that perplexed me a bit, because I found it a lot easier to just eat at home that night and just donate some money to CFMT.
But it's easy to sit on my high-horse and feel self-righteous about my moral purity. What's harder is to take a closer look at the efficacy of these tactics, and doing so has forced me to acknowledge that it does nonetheless have a net positive benefit for a few reasons:
• Sadly, there are people out there that don't know (or care) to donate or volunteer, but they will buy a brownie at a bake sale or go out to eat, or whatever, because it's for charity.
• If you're going out to eat anyway, it can't hurt to hit up a participating venue.
What doesn't sit well with me are a few edge cases of how this behavior manifests:
• Excessive crowing/back-patting about participating. I mean, come on, you just went to dinner. You want a medal with your dessert?
• Using charity (or tragedy, as in the case of the floods) as a thinly veiled excuse for self/product-promotion (as in the case of the Tennessean's book). I agree with Betsy that it seems very unlikely that a significant amount of profit (or indeed probably any at all) is being generated from the sale of that book. I saw a lot of other similar cases after the flooding — for example, photographers advertising that 10 percent of all the print sales at their show will go towards flood relief. I mean, I've been to photography shows before. At most of them you're lucky if you sell one print. And 10 percent of your average print sale? Not impressed.
In general, though, I mostly just want to give a hearty "shut the hell up" to the moral posturing and self-righteousness that has emerged post-flooding — and I direct this at myself as well. It's easy to add a twibbon and totally facebook it to your myspace and have over 10,000 retweets. It's easy to pat yourself on the back because you bought a shirt. It's easy to criticize someone else because they only bought a shirt while you actually donated money (aren't you special!). It's easy to give people shit because they dared to do something that doesn't measure up to your own particular ruler of righteousness.
What's harder is to realize that everyone's doing what they can and that maybe you should just worry about yourself. What's a lot harder is to maintain the level of charity that's going to be required to sustain recovery through the next few years — long after #nashvilleflood was a trending twitter topic, and the hard work of flood recovery has lost its luster.
Comments (1)
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Don't forget the Swan Ball, where the WASP elite pretends it's still the 19th century. If they want to help Cheekwood, write a check instead of preening in front of other dilettantes.
Don't forget that things like this may be done for the tax benefit, not the benefit of the poor or needy.
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