Oh, Go Fund Yourself

Is it just me, or do other people think that phrases like “a Go Fund Me page has been set up” are becoming all too common?

What used to be a way to get small dollar donors to support an innovation or give to legitimate charities is turning into a low-effort and less humiliating way to beg for money. Legitimate requests for help, from circumstances of real need, are rapidly morphing into: I lost my iPhone, help me buy another one; I want to surprise my old college friend and show up at his wedding, help send me; come see our Christmas light display at our house, it’s fabulous, and here’s where you can help defer the cost of putting it on!

Those are real things people have turned to the internet to finance, and the term “tip of the iceberg” was never more apt. It’s a very bizarre twisting of the word ”help”.

When people truly need help, I have no complaint about helping them. Remember Portia’s speech in Shakespeare’s ”The Merchant of Venice”. It begins with “the quality of mercy is not strain’d” and goes on to extol the virtues and values of forgiveness and generosity. It’s a beautiful speech, worth holding in mind and heart.

That given, I am dismayed and irritated at how many people around me are starting to reflexively ask for ”donations”. I guess that if we transform begging to a nice, clean, mouse-click activity--if we take away the aspect where you have to stand on a corner and ask in person for spare change--we’ll somehow make panhandling not so awful for both sides of the transaction.

”Ask and you shall receive” is being taken in a bad direction, though.

A casual friend of mine started a crowd funding effort about a year before one of her kids was due to go on the traditional 8th grade school trip to DC. I got all the emails directing me to the site to donate to help them raise the $1,500 needed. I ignored them. But, I was quietly offended by this. To me, she and her husband were responsible for their child’s needs and wants. I knew they had jobs and they’d never cast this kind of net before, so this seemed a reasonable expectation. I felt my donation dollars were more needed elsewhere.

Over time, there were reminders to donate wrapped in “updates“ that were more irritating, and it struck me that the parents never talked about how much they were saving over the course of the year for this, or what would happen to the money raised if the child did not end up going to DC, etc. An email that went to dozens of us said that our donations would be counted in lieu of any birthday or Christmas presents for the year for this kid. The last update stunned me. It said that they had raised $1,420 and were ”so close!” to the goal, all they needed was a couple more donations!

I fumed, but I didn’t confront. All I felt I had to do to stay out of this was stay out of this.

I was wrong.

My friend confronted me at a picnic. “Hey, Vicky, I noticed you haven’t donated yet (?!) to the DC trip.“ I said, politely but firmly, “No, I haven’t. I‘m not very big on the Go Fund Me thing.” Hint, hint, don’t poke the bear, especially when she’s just trying to enjoy a pick-a-nick basket in the shade with Yogi and Boo-Boo. But, poke she did and this eventually turned into an ugly, talking-through-clenched-teeth argument. I told her I thought it was wrong for her to ask others, and so publicly, to be totally responsible for paying for something optional for her kid. She told me that she thought I was selfish and worse, and that she knew I could afford to chip in but was just being “hateful”. My last words to her then and probably forever were, “have a nice life”.

What do you think about this phenomenon? What are the strain points in your own quality of mercy? Is this the new paradigm, especially as we let greedy corporatist power-brokers destroy the American middle-class and our safety-net of public assistance? People will have to advertise and increasingly compete for private donors as if they are their own mini-charities? Are we going backwards, toward a Dickensian society? We’ve already begun to create 21st century debtors’ prisons, for goodness’ sake.

Many of us have had someone we cared about ask us personally for financial help. If you’re like me, you’ve also been the person doing the asking. That’s life--good times and bad, family and friends, helping out and being helped. But, it seems that technology has strapped a rocket onto the count of people willing to ask, and to the number of things they’re willing to ask for.

If it’s becoming more okay to ask so much more of so many more people, shouldn’t it be more okay if the answer is sometimes “no”, if for no other reason than that it can’t possibly always be “yes“?