as always, Doug Stanhope hit’s the nail on the head
Whatever your cause, your charity, or your drive, your effort: audit it.
Because so much of it is symbolism over substance, where people think they’re helping by doing nothing. Audit all the time and effort, and see if you’re actually effecting change. Rather than just,
“Oh, we’re gonna have a 10K Fun Run for the Cure!”
“Come on down on Sunday; it’s a 10K Fun Run for the Cure!”
Why? Why! When has running ever cured anything?
I don’t understand the cause and effect on this. Is that how Jonas Salk cured [sic] polio, by speed walking around the track down at St. Mary’s High School with a wife-beater on and a paper number safety-pinned to his back?
“Oh, we’re doing it for the cure!”
How are you curing anything?
“Well, what I do is, I get sponsors, and every time I go around the track another time, my sponsor gives me another quarter for the cure!”
Are your friends that sick and sadomasochistic that they wouldn’t just cut you a check outright for the cure? They make you do weird [crap] first?
“Larry, you know my daughter was born with cerebral palsy, and we’re trying to get a big fundraiser going…”
“Really? Yeah…how many hard boiled eggs will ya eat? Come on! You love your kid right, come on!”
No, they would cut you a check outright, but you’re that much of a megalomaniac that you have to make the cure about you. You need the spotlight in this. You could just get a check, but no one’s gonna be,
“Ya know, the truth is I do the same speed walk at St. Mary’s every morning at 6:30 before work with my labrador Sheeba. I’m trying to shed a few pounds, ya know? But no one claps for me then and calls me heroic, so I’m gonna do it on Sunday afternoon for the cure, and everyone’s gonna go, ‘Go Ray go!'”
It’s a 10K fun run about you, you megalomaniac. Stop it. You know you’re not doing [crap]. You could just get the check from your friend and then actually do something that means something other than running.
Put that time and effort and money into something that’s calculated that actually helps.
“We’re gonna knit a SARS quilt! It’s gonna take all summer long!”
“We’re gonna have a prayer circle.”
“We’re gonna have a candle light vigil at midnight!”
Could you do less??
Mathematically, ask your accountant if there’s any way you could do any less than that…
“Well, we are raising awareness!”
Raising awareness is another form of doing nothing.
Only now, you’re making me aware that the nothing that I’ve been doing is not up to par with the nothing that you’re doing for such a noble cause. Why don’t you do my nothing for your cause? We’ll watch Storage Wars for the cure! Then we’ll both be happy in our impotence…and we’ll find out what’s in that safe!
We all win!
Raising awareness is me standing next to a drainage ditch where a guy just hit a goat with his moped on the highway, and now they’re in the ditch, laying in the muck with compound fractures, and the dude’s got a bone sticking through his leg, and the [freaking] goat’s got a bone sticking through his fur. They’re both laying there in agony, and I’m raising awareness by standing above them shouting down an empty highway,
“LOOOOOOOK! LOOOOOOOO-OOOOOOOOK! EWWWWWWWWWWWWW! EW, LOOOOOK!”
And they’re going, “No, HEEEEEEEEELP!”
“No, no, no! LOOOOOOOOOOOOOK!”
It’s way easier to just say, “LOOOOOOOOOK!”
