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| Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
I have something of a
confession to make. After spending an evening draining pints and loading up on
carcinogens, a breast cancer charity collector came up to our table, shaking a
bucket and muttering something about canvassing for donations.
Around the table, my friends dutifully looked down and fumbled through their
pockets, either preparing to contribute or feigning being out of change. Without
thinking, I looked up to her and said (sarcastically, I might add), “I haven’t
been personally affected by breast cancer, so I don’t really care.”
She left without
collecting a single donation.
The fact that I said that out loud rather than thinking
something more reasonable is obviously down to my rank intoxication at the
time, but I do stand by the point I was attempting to make. Nobody likes being guilted
into donating money to a serious cause when they’re trying to have a good time,
but the thing that really annoyed me was her. She was imposing this guilt on
us, and I assumed that she cared enough to do so because she knows or knew somebody
with breast cancer.
I know that it wasn’t
necessarily the case (and obviously people can and do campaign for issues that
have never affected them), but the fact that she haughtily retreated rather than
arguing with me seems like something of a confirmation. To me, giving money to
or working for a charity because somebody you know has been affected by the
issue is more self-interested than altruistic. Breast cancer didn’t
spontaneously pop up in half a million people like a mutant jack in the box at the moment your aunt was
diagnosed,
but somehow it wasn’t important enough to do anything about until then.
Had I been sober (and
armed with statistics) I’d have asked her why she wasn’t raising donations for
the 33.4 million people living with HIV around the world, or for coronary heart
disease (which tops all other diseases for deaths in the UK). Numbers don’t
lie, and since 2000 it’s taken considerably more people than breast cancer. In
2010, just over 129 people died from coronary heart disease per 100,000 population
compared to just under 37 per 100,000 women
for breast cancer. Likewise, lung cancer, cerebrovascular disease and even
pneumonia kill more people every year than breast cancer.
University of Kent researcher Beth Breeze’s study on the reasons people give to charity supports the idea that charitable
donations are not based on the level of need, “but rather [people] support causes that mean
something to them.” Although this should balance out (bigger problems affect
more people and therefore receive more donations), the moral superiority people
feel for donating to a cause is completely misplaced if they’ve been personally
affected by it. In that moment, the woman thought I was one of the most despicable
people on the face of the planet, but she was being blinded by her own hypocrisy.
It’s
selfish giving because what they’re doing is trying to lessen their own
suffering. If you have an infection, you can take a course of antibiotics and you’ll start
to feel better. But if you get a condition that can’t be cured or comfortably managed,
there isn't much action you can realistically take. As primitive survival
instincts kick in, you go into “fight” mode, but the predator you’re dealing
with doesn’t have a body to brutalise or a secret military compound to bomb
into oblivion. Research is the way we fight these predators, and that means the
only thing a regular person can do to lessen their own suffering is to canvas
for donations. If there was a pill for it, they’d take it and blissfully ignore
all the people in poverty-stricken countries dying from the same problem.
The
reason I come off looking like a drunken prick in that situation is because
charity is “good,” in essence. She’s doing a good thing by raising money for
breast cancer, and only an abhorrent, inhuman ogre would point out that she’s
just dressing selfishness up to look like altruism.
