Hope for Gifts

It must be Christmas, er, Holiday. I am starting to get those expensively designed appeals for my after tax money in the form of charity giving. Big glossy pictures of smiling kids. For only a small fee, you can buy their village a water pump, plant a mango tree, or give them a goat. They will never again need a handout. I would link to the website, but that would give the activists who lurk on this site an excuse to denounce me so that they could get a fat informants bonus check. You have a brain: I am sure you got the same thick booklet of Hope for Gifts. I have gotten three so far. Don't you read your junk mail?



One of my earliest memories of my Mother is of us sitting at the kitchen table and putting together some box to put pennies in so we could collect money at Halloween, er, Black and Orange Day, so that we could end poverty on the planet. My brother and I gathered enough pennies that year to buy a pump for fresh water for a downtrodden village in Africa. And some goats, and carrot seeds. These unfortunates would never need help again, we were told. That was many years ago, when the gap between rich and poor was not as large as it is now. The Mayor of Brampton was a member of the Orange Lodge, back then. I wonder how the village whom my brother and I bought a pump for fresh water is doing now? They must be happy to never need entitlements from the racist shithole of Canada, let alone that racist bastion of the fascists, long ago, far off Brampton, Ontario, 1965. Improved with fresh water, goats, and carrot seeds, they can turn their backs on the evil white man and get back to celebrating the culture that built the pyramids, then abandoned them for sustainable stone age living.

The newspaper which carried the glossy brochure asking for my after tax money also brought news about the Afro-centric High School in Toronto. The N-people were all angry in that article, and the new high school was too small an effort to address the endemic and impossible to buy off legacy of colonialism in Africa, let alone the legacy of slavery in Canada, or the current outrages of racism and lynching and intolerance in the Toronto school system. I guess the angry parents did not get the handouts in time, back in the past, from some years ago when some greedy white racist decided to not put two cents into the, now called, Black and Orange box. Helping in the past did not help enough, so we should help more now, even if the amount of helping needed is growing faster than your ability to give. Some spit in your face will punctuate this reality.

These charities never have results, only great marketing. What ever happened to the village I bought goats for in 1965? What about the crop of carrots I paid for in 1966? I know I am a racist, rapist, sexist scum, I know. I could just hate myself better and probably fork up more after tax income if I had some crumb of belief that the money rolling down the rat hole was making the rats happy. (You better not say rats are bad; if you do, you are an earth rapist).

This year, I am channeling my charity dollar to a different charity. There is endemic racism in Alberta, so I am going to help fund some initiatives there. The people I am helping do not spend money on advertising, it is all word of mouth. The things they do are in keeping with their culture, so nobody will get offended like when the health care system here in Ontario refused to pay for female circumcision. I will not even get a tax receipt. Who needs that when you work mainly in the black market? I will not tempt myself with a swelled head by bragging about what these people are doing. Just take comfort in the fact that I am giving hope to where it is most needed, in the racist heartland of Alberta. That is where all the guns come for gun crime in Toronto, don't you know. Alberta needs my help, it needs the Hope of Gifts, and gifts it is going to get. As for the other always needy people, they will just have to shift with the fresh water pumps, carrots, and goats I got them over fiscal 1965 through 2010.