Your cause here

As the rainbow of rubber bracelets grows -- today's addition, white from Live 8 -- I can't help but wonder how sincere people's charitable intentions are. Obviously, something like the Live 8 bracelet is a status symbol, showing you went to the concert. Will politicians actually notice or care how many people are wearing them? Will it affect policies toward Africa? Somehow I doubt it. Call me callous.

It seems to me that Americans, while I'm sure we have wonderful intentions, have a great fear of poverty and catastrophe. The church we currently attend is a wonderful example. They collect money for this and that, those generous blue-bloods of my little town, but heck if they'll dirty their hands actually building a Habitat house. Not that I'm much better, of course. I try to give money to the food banks whenever I get a request in the mail, an effort to give back what we've been given these past few years, but I don't serve at a soup kitchen. I didn't sign up for the one Habitat work day our church had (though of course I was scheduled to work, as always, which hampers actual activity). And like so many people, when I saw the images of the tsunami in Asia, I responded quickly with a donation to Doctors Without Borders.

And that donation got me thinking. We see this great, incomprehensible disaster, and of course we respond. We send our hundred dollars or so off, and then forget about the problem. Throw money at it and subconsciously hope the scary boogeyman of suffering will go away. Make that tax-deductible gift and go back to your comfortable life in the suburbs. Or the city, or the country, or just about anywhere in this country other than perhaps the Mississippi Delta. Suffering scares us. It shows us how vulnerable we are, and that just can't happen in America. We're perfect, we're invincible, we're wrapped in our materialistic coccoon so tightly that we don't realize how fragile it is. There's a reason the poor are generally the most charitable, they understand what the people are actually feeling. They aren't living in a happy little bubble. A couple hundred years ago, death featured prominantly even in childrens toys. It was understood that children would have lost a few siblings, many other relatives. Not that I'm advocating a higher infant mortality rate, of course, just a bit of a reality check. We need to respond with true empathy and action, not just slip a bracelet on our wrist, wave some money in the general direction of tragedy and then run as quickly as possible in the other direction.

That said, I would have loved to have been at the Live 8 in London ...