Silsby Samizdat

I feel so powerless!

Our university sponsors an annual fund drive to solicit donations from the faculty and staff to give to pretty much every possible charity in the area. The problem I'm running up against is that you can have donations deducted from your paycheck for pretty much every possible charity in the area.

My first thought was, ok, this will be like alumni giving. They want to get participation rate up, so I will oblige and give a buck or two. But then I went to the donation page. There is a list of hundreds of non-profits to which I can make my donation!

How do I chose whether feeding the poverty stricken homeless is more important than educating people about AIDS or providing a fund for scholarships for African-American students or ensuring water and soil conservation groups can operate or, or, or! (and suddenly the Arts organizations I've auditioned for that appeared on that non-profit list seemed staggeringly pretentious and petty)

There are so many places that I could donate. Then I have to decide how much to donate. But a couple bucks seems so insulting. But if I want to be able to pay my own bills, I have to stick close to my current budget. Sure I could cut my ritual of going out for lunch once a week in order to give a donation to a food shelf. I don't need to go out for drinks with friends every week, so that I can donate to an alcoholism support group. But what do I cut next? I'm sure my insurance company would understand if I shifted my payments from them to some charity to provide health care to the uninsured. Or my landlord would understand the necessity of cutting half of my monthly rent check to a help defeat homelessness fund.

I feel so impotent. Even given my less than median income, and faced with my own debts and bills, I know that I am still in a significantly better financial situation than many people in the country, my state, my city, but I still can't do as much as I want. I could quit my job and, like my parents, work for a place that will directly help more people, provided I could find a job in this current economic environment. I could stop auditioning for shows, and instead volunteer somewhere. But what good would an unemployed, depressed, person who has given up on his dreams do for the community?

I know I shouldn't place these non-profits in a false bidding war of who is more worthy of my piddly donation, which pales in comparison to their operating costs. I know that "every little bit helps." But I still feel that the little I can give is insulting.

This rant was probably just the culmination of my worries from over the past year about the economic situation of the country, my budget, my future plans for grad school, and feelings of frivolousness for of the current state of the arts.

Excuse me while I go make another donation-deduction from my paycheck.

I feel sick now.

Posted by silsby at October 14, 2004 08:24 AM