When I'm at the end of my rope, I write everywhere for help. Usually I don't reach out until I need serious help: like legal help help. Like shelter. Like a place to go for resources. Like a way to protect fundamental human rights.
People just can't get this help anymore. I guess friends and communities and churches used to be the place to get it, but not anymore. Now what you get when you reach out is a subscription to an email list and a barrage of emails asking for money.
Your ostensible "political representatives" are by far the worst offenders. They won't respond to an email, or give you phone time with an assistant of an assistant, much less give you actual appointment time, unless you are VIP contributor. If you're on welfare, you might as well not exist to them.
I admit the Internet is a bad place to respond with help. What I usually see is a good person making an offer to help (often to the wrong person), and then a bunch of scammers rush in to try to reproduce the circumstances and soak up all the available loose change, so the people who really need help still can't get it. I remember when I posted my welfare diaries on Daily Kos: I wasn't asking for anything, though I could have used help in various ways. But I gave people ideas. Within the hour, there was a "Suddenly Homeless" scammer dominating the rec list and using the community as a fund raising platform. The same thing had happened a couple years earlier when I had asked for (non-financial) help sourcing medical specialists for particular problems while I was uninsured: people who were still living in middle class circumstances rushed in making big drama, singing praises of the "community" as they raised money to see "specialists" for their yuppie diseases. Basically rushing in to exploit a door I had opened, but effectively shutting it for people who might have desperately needed financial help.
So...the Internet sucks as a means of directing charity for the same reasons as "faith-based" volunteerism is: it's fragmented, distorted, and scarily easy to manipulate. And people with means suffer from "compassion fatigue" far before the line gets to the fairly timid people who actually need their compassion.
But, in lieu of anyone bothering to set up mediating local social infrastructure that actually helps people with their problems, what to do?
My thought, ust from writing this, is to stop spending so much money on abstract online stuff. But do recognize the CAUSE of all the begging and step outside your door. The legit people zinging around the Internet begging for stuff are doing so because they don't know what else to do: there are no local resources. There is no recourse. Is there a way to put money in local government, in those dreaded "parcel taxes", so you can demand and see results? Could you help create local jobs? Could you help make sure no one in your community was starving? Could you make your city a model of civilization? If that makes your city so desirable that it drives rents sky-high, would you take the initiative in subsidizing housing for people working in the nonprofit sector? Or for elderly people living on fixed incomes?
It's fine to Just Say No to all these Internet shakedowns, but the right thing to do is address their cause from the other side and reduce desperation at the local level.
= new reply since forum marked as read
