Charity sans Clarity.
I recall the days of yesteryear when volunteers for this or that charity, clutching collection tins, would waylay me and guilt me into donating a few coins. It became a sort of game so that if you caught sight of the collector and crossed to the opposite side of the street, you won, but if the collector spotted you first you lost and so ungrudgingly paid up.
Today it's all different and has grown into a high pressure sales business that includes over-frequently screened highly expensive TV ads, and intrusive ads; e-mailed and on the Web, cleverly designed to manipulate the buttons of our emotions into indefinitely donating via monthly direct debit payments. These businesses apparently need highly expensive CEOs and well-paid support staff that all no doubt would need expenses, pensions, transport etc. This leaves me wondering what percentage of my monthly donation would ever reach the ones the TV screened celebrity or sportsperson earnestly reassured us would be the deserving recipients. The deserving recipients may range from abused donkeys to neglected children sleeping in the streets, or the plight of nationless refugees. But whichever deserving cause is taken up, it is always accompanied by the high-pressure, laid-on-guilt sales campaigns that surely must raise the hackles of would-be donors.
The UK government send abroad many millions of pounds of tax-payers' money in foreign aid to, for example, India, and meanwhile India develops its highly expensive space industry. It can't be considered uncharitable to wonder why some of this aid couldn't be channelled to reach and bring succour to the current heart-breaking victims of Monsoon flooding and poverty so recently emblazoned on to our TV screens.
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