11 March

People are constantly bombarded with requests for money and/or assistance for various causes, often through schools but also through workplaces and even via harassment in the street or on the phone or internet. It's now a professional industry too, with lots of contention about the cut the professionals take. And so many cutesy ways to dress it up, people starving themselves, bucketing themselves with iced water, wearing red noses, taking on ridiculous physical endurance challenges, buying bandaged bears etc. What's the real problem here? Is all of this fundraising about inequality too, where basic services aren't provided any more because so much governance is about cutting taxes and costs to the better off? So the rest of us are called upon more and more to fund these basic requirements. Philanthropy for example has always been central to social provision in the US, with its minimalist public sector, so maybe us gutting our own public services is causing this shift here too. (And also, how many people actually investigate whether the cause they're supporting is a genuine and sensible one? Dressing it up with cute stunts is designed to stop people looking too hard at what they're shelling out for. And are a lot of these cute stunts increasingly more about the people doing them, and their love of stunts, than about the causes themselves?)