The Age of “Me”: “Chariteees”

I remember the old times, when people had the fear of the Lord and knew a thing or three about Christianity. They were more modest and intelligent than today, too.

In the old times, people did good and did not tell anyone. It was considered something in extremely bad taste, and stupid to boot, to advertise your own “goodness”. Besides, the Church was the main channel of charitable activities, as in those times even atheists esteemed her work bith on the local and international level.

This has completely changed. In the Age of “Me”, fear of the Lord has disappeared, and the consciousness of one’s Unique Awesomeness informs most individual decision. Therefore, the New Snowflake is not only not ashamed at all, but even proud to let you know how wonderfully good he is. This, of course, in the case that he is not actually scrounging, what a lot of nowadays’ “chariteees ” actually do full time.

Let’s say I love jogging and want to take part to, say, the New York Marathon. I can set up my own “chariteee” and then invite everyone to “help my chariteee”, which “raises awareness about breadt cancer”. I can, obviously, deduct the costs of my “charitable” activity from the donations I get. As I will, likely, never even cover my costs, the net sumac the exercise is that I have scrounged from friends, acquaintances, colleagues and everyone I was shameless enough to approach (which is: absolutely everyone, because I am so persuaded of my Unique Awesomeness) a part of the costs I would have paid anyway, signalling virtue like there is no tomorrow in the process. The people say I want to help will see nothing or (if I decide to advertise some payment “of my own pocket”) almost nothing, but hey, look at how Utterly Bloody Awesome I am!

There are many variations of this, and a frequent one is the young scrounger (or I should say: XXI Century Beggar) smiling at me in the most hypocritical way as he tries to “connect” and start touching me for his good cause; obviously without telling me that he will get a very big chunk of my standing order, and that the chariteee does not care to divulge the scandal because It’s all extra money in their coffins anyway. All this would not exist without the Age of “Me”, or at least the phenomenon would be much reduced. In fact, when I was a child the street chariteee scroungers did not exist, at all.

And now excuse me, I need to go establish a “chariteee” to raise awareness about prostate cancer, after which I hope there will be enough idiots around to pay a part of the costs of my favourite hobby.

M