Have you noticed that these days it is almost impossible to be applauded as a do-gooder?
No matter what type of good you choose to do, there is always someone who delights in telling you that you are not really a do-gooder at all.
Take buying a goat for an impoverished African farmer, for example. No sooner do you press “send” on your Visa transaction then someone submits an opinion piece to the New York Times detailing the negative impact your goat purchase will have.
The farmer who receives the goat, you read, will be either vilified by the other, now jealous, villagers, or the goat will be used as a dowry for the farmer’s daughter, thus perpetuating a custom that treats women as chattel. If, of course your $20 actually buys a goat and not to pay the charity’s overhead expenses.
Other charitable donations to food banks or the Salvation Army are equally criticized as simply perpetuating the existence of the underclass by supporting their unproductive and selfishly needy lifestyle. If no one gave away free stuff, say the pundits, the poor would all get jobs.
Donate to hospitals? No, that lets health authorities off the hook. And since Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are now branded in editorials as foreign based, special interest groups, you better not give any money to them.
Oh, and don’t even think of donating any money to a zoo on the pretext of preserving a few, endangered animals. And don’t take your kids there either. The admission fee is just another donation that perpetuates the cruel practice of incarcerating wild beasts. Better to live short, brutal, but free lives in the wild than be kept captive in a zoo.
Speaking of animals, you are doing the local wild creatures no favours by feeding them. This applies to all animals, not just the bears and deer.
All the money and time you are spending feeding hummingbirds, chickadees and sparrows, blue jays and grosbeaks, squirrels and chipmunks … Cut it out! You are killing them all by making them dependent on you! It says so on the Internet!
So stop doing all that. No matter what you do, no matter how good your intentions, you are really just another ill-informed, goody-goody, do-gooder who will end up harming the very people, animals and environment that you want to help.
And by the way, that “want to help” feeling you have? Talk show psychologists will tell you it’s just a weakness, a personality flaw that shows how much you want approval and others to like you. So go home, close the door, sit in your room and let nature and the world take its course.
– Jim Holtz is WEEKENDER columnist and former reporter for the Grand Forks Gazette.