I'm sure most of you know these stories already, as they are taking the internet by storm, but it's the kind of thing that really interests me/breaks my heart/makes me want to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Which is obviously something that is common amongst many people because 3 (fairly) recent incidents have inspired what has been coined as rage donations, and the scale of them have been really escalating.
The first came in the London riots of 2011. The lawlessness was spreading like wildfire and a Malaysian exchange student was punched in the face and had his bike stolen. His jaw was broken and as he was sitting on the side of the road, a crowd gathered, seemingly to help him, but one of the guys in the bunch that gathered unzipped his backpack while he was pre-occupied and took his wallet and ran off. Talk about preying on the weak! It was all captured on someone's phone camera and googling it to put it up here made me angry about it all over again:
It was one of the many images that really stayed with Londoners that summer. People were incensed, a lot more so than when seeing The Foot Locker lose all its merchandise. I'm not sure if it's more wrong to rob a person than a face-less corporation, but I'm definitely one of those people that let emotions steer my decision on what's right and wrong. And i must not be the only one, because one of his friends set up a donation page to help him get the surgery required for his jaw and to maybe pay for a small gift for him to make him feel better. Well-wishers flooded the donation site, accumulating £22,000 for him before his friend then shut down the page to say it had collected enough.
9 months later, the original criminals have also been brought to justice, which you can read about here and here.
The next instance of this occurred 2 weeks ago. At the beginning of May, a 10 year old girl in Scotland started the cutest blog about her school lunch. It's called Neverseconds and she calls herself VEG (super super cute, please read her blogger profile explaining the name). Every day, she would take a picture of her lunch, describe it, rate it on taste, health, and even report any hairs found in her food (mostly none, thankfully). She encouraged other children to send her pictures of their food, and enthusiastically reported on her favourite meals and not-so-favourite meals. She was not critical of the food, though honest if sometimes she felt she hadn't had enough or was too scared to ask for extra salad and fruit. Her blog became popular really quickly, amassing tens of thousands of hits in a matter of days. Local and national news coverage followed, and Jamie Oliver sent her father tweets and autographed one of his cookbooks and sent it to her. She decided to take the attention and direct it to a good cause - raising money for Mary's Meals, a charity that feeds children at schools in various countries in Africa. Her goal was to reach £7,000 which would build one whole kitchen . She also encourages other kids to send her pictures of their meals and then plays a game with her Dad where he spins the globe and she has to find where her latest email has come from. She even documents how many seconds it takes her to locate it, so sweet.
But suddenly, THE MAN decided that what she was doing was drawing too much unwarranted criticism of the school canteen, and the local council decided to ban her photography, putting an end to her blog. She posted a sad little goodbye on the 14th of June, lamenting that she didn't think she was now able to raise the £7,000 she wanted to for a kitchen for Mary's Meals.
Rage donations again ensued. People took to the tinternet in a blaze of fury, red mist descending before their eyes as they clicked the donate button furiously and posted vitriolic messages against the local council on comments sections of the news articles covering her blog's unfair demise. This time, vengeance was even quicker, and within two days the council had to reverse their decision, with local politicians having to come out and make apologies, and back she is again with her camera at school. She has now raised over £100,000 for Mary's Meals and her blog has had nearly 7 million views!!!
But the biggest rage donation of all is happening this week. As I type, sympathetic You-tube viewers all over the world are trying to make up for the assinine behaviour rained down upon a elderly bus monitor by, get this, SEVENTH GRADERS. I'm not linking the video because it's too horrible. You can read a longer summary here, but here's my take: What is wrong with people these days? These kids bullied and harassed said elderly bus monitor on the ride home from the bus, calling her fat, poking her, calling her so unloveable that she has no family (and I'm not sure whether they were aware that her son had committed suicide years earlier), reducing her to tears. They then had the audacity to post this video to youtube. But then, maybe it's good that they did, because through this forum attention was drawn to the suffering she'd gone through, and again, a well-wisher set up a donation page to raise money to give her a nice holiday. I think she may now just be able to take a permanent holiday, given that I think it's raised over $600,000 (more than most people's retirement funds??). Most definitely, giving to someone that people feel has had a wrong done to them makes people feel good.
I like the ends to these stories. But it does pose a lot of questions. Does it make up for the wrong that's been done to them? Would you suffer 10 minutes of emotional abuse for $600k? What about all the people who invariably would have suffered similar or much worse, and haven't been compensated in the same way, or at all? What makes people click donate in such massive volume but not give a penny to the bum that you see on the street every day?
Is it just the internet that has driven this behaviour?
I don't know. But I'm going to make Keith donate to Neverseconds today. He needs to do it rather than I because he's in the UK and can claim Gift Aid (where the government add another % to the donation because of tax!)
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