Dear Friends:
This article is from the NY Times (01 05 2012) -bhuban March 31, 2012, 8:41 AM Let Them Eat Charity By SUMEDH MUNGEE Dan Gill for The New York Times A cash donation box at the counter of Saint Louis Bread Company in Clayton, Missouri. The other day, at my daughter’s private school in Sunnyvale, California, a parent handed me a flier soliciting donations for a 7-year-old boy, Ujjwal Sharma, who was recently diagnosed with leukemia. The leaflet showed Ujjwal (who lives in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh) on a hospital bed, hooked up to all sorts of medical equipment. His parents, the flier said, are nearly broke. Like most of the other parents, all people with kids of Ujjwal’s age, I declined to donate. Our “vote,” as it were, was nearly unanimous. We are, as Slavoj Žižek calls us in a recent essay for the London Review of Books, the “salaried bourgeoisie” — upper middle-class professionals who won the career lottery. We entered the right professions (mostly, technology) at the right time (the late ’90s). In an alternate universe, the technology boom never happened, and we’re waiting tables for the writers, art majors and school teachers, instead of the other way around. (Of course, to do reallywell, it wasn’t enough to have won just the career lottery; we needed high IQs as well—the ovarian lottery.) But, as believers in the Gospel of Growth, we don’t see the world in terms of haves and have-nots, but instead the haves and the will-have-soons — or, should that be the will-have-eventuallys? The should-have-had-by-nows? Bubble after apocalyptic bubble is telling us that the system is broken. But we swat away any cognitive dissonance; we persuade ourselves, in our finest moments of passive-aggressive humility, that we’re just “ordinary middle-class folk”; we love post-apocalyptic shows like the “Walking Dead” (could the symbolism be any more obvious?); and we chant c’est la vie, because, in the end, we’d much rather give up than give. When we don’t donate, conventional wisdom says it is because of our “apathy.” It sounds seductive, but the apathy argument — “people don’t donate because they are apathetic” — is actually just a clever way of restating the problem. It’s like saying, “people buy Apple products because they feel emotionally attached to them.” (The analogy between charity and Apple is not all that far-fetched; as critics of Apple argue, and honest fans will agree, the benefits of buying Apple are more emotional than rational.) But there is a more sinister message implicit in the apathy argument, and this may explain why it seems satisfying to so many: it allows us to believe that we are suffering from a disease. The only thing left to explain, really, is the cause: our childhoods were either too troubled or we were overly protected; our jobs are either killing our souls with stress or dulling our minds with boredom; if only we felt more financially secure we’d do more, or maybe money causes apathy; the evil media is desensitizing us; Facebook’s faux-emotionalism is destroying our ability to have “real” relationships — maybe we were too hasty in discarding religion?! Our apathy is also a cancer, isn’t it? And somewhere, over the rainbow, where Oprah lives, there must be a cure. Charity is a fickle god. When Amit Gupta, a 32-year-old Bay area technology entrepreneur, was diagnosed with the same cancer as Ujjwal’s, the imams of social media quickly issued terse fatwas of support. Mr. Gupta trended on Twitter. A compatible bone-marrow donor was found and the transplant was successful. The mainstream media, never afraid to tell us what we’ve already decided to be true, flooded us with post-facto comforting messages: social media is the savior, you’re not wasting your life online, and you’re part of a revolution! Maybe the Twitterati have now stepped out for a three-martini lunch, because they haven’t noticed Ujjwal. The @HelpUjjwal Twitter account has only gathered 13 followers. Mukur Mankad, who helps lead the Help Ujjwal campaign, says they have raised about $6,000 from the U.S. — far, far less than what Ujjwal needs. Ujjwal isn’t very trendy, I suppose; he isn’t a technology entrepreneur (yet) and his story is about as interesting as Jessica Lal’s would have been if she’d been killed not by Manu Sharma, but by a drunk driver—filed under: c’est la vie. The truth is that financial charity, as practiced by many of us, is an unaccountable, mercurial and consumerist game like any other, opium for the bourgeoisie, but scented like devotional incense. Ujjwal’s life needs to be marketed to us—preferably by attractive white women; studies into charity show that we would then be more likely to donate. Besides, we’re all philosophers and visionaries now, obese on a diet of Ted talks and op-ed columns that we secretly feel we should be writing rather than reading (just look at the comments sections). Our “salaried bourgeoisie” psyche demands we support issues worthy of our mighty intellects, issues where we could change the course of human history. We have Occupy, Tahrir and Lokpal on our minds, but only on our minds. What we really want, as the T-shirt slogan says, is one more bubble. Stories like Ujjwal’s are mere specks on our retina displays; we zoom out, swipe away, and turn off. The need to be honest about charity is more urgent than ever. One especially rancid idea in the Republican Party ideology (shown in full-frontal nudity during the recent debates) is “Let them eat charity”: the positioning of charity as the primary social safety net. It’s the latest ideological prosthetic — made in America, but available for discerning governments everywhere. Margaret Thatcher’s famous warning, “the trouble with socialism is eventually you run out of other people’s money,” can be readily renovated to suit our current world governance: the trouble with crony capitalism is eventually you run out of other people to exploit. In late January, there was good news: Mukur’s team found a “10/10” bone marrow donor (basically, an ideal match) for Ujjwal. A successful bone marrow transplant could cure Ujjwal’s type of cancer (acute myelomonocytic leukemia), just like it has helped Amit Gupta. A few routine tests on the donor, the doctors said, and then they would perform the transplant. The donor never showed up. As Oprah might have said, “He gets a vote, she gets a vote, you get a vote, and everyone gets a vote!” Visit helpujjwal.com to donate, or to register as a bone marrow donor. For more information, contact Mukur Mankad, at mu...@hotmail.com. Sumedh Mungee is a software engineer and writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can reach him via his website: www.mungee.org, or on Twitter: @sumedhmungee _______________________________________________ assam mailing list assam@assamnet.org http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
