Conscience Tax

Did you now know that it is possible to sponsor just about anything? You can sponsor a dog, jaguar, a variety of children, or just girls, a polar bear, a donkey, wikipedia, ethno-nationalist terrorism and even fools. With such a bewildering array of websites dedicated to building wells, performing Shakespeare, vaccinating donkeys and blowing up Thatcher, one has to wonder just where to spend your hard earned money. People everywhere seem to be suffering a little harder than usual, and the problem of just which one deserves a bit of nobilis oblige from the worlds richest nations is a pressing concern.

Of course, we do have rampant drug abuse and crippling poverty at home. I was a British Red Cross donor for some time, so I frequently got emails thanking me for my meagre coins and telling me that people are dying. Lots of people. All the time. Which is not the kind of news you want first thing in a morning, but whatever. Nothing quite like economic genocide and cornflakes to wake you up.

Anyway, there is also a plethora of price comparison websites, and that gave me a bit of an idea for a double tiered charity system.

 First, we can do a general donation website. Charities pay a fee to join it, which then goes into a pot. People who put money into it by sponsorship and donations also pay into this gigantic wellspring of philanthropy, which is then distributed between all the charities that have joined it.

Second, for the more discerning scrooge amongst us who doesn't want to give up too much of his hard-earned cash, we can create a series of drop-bars and questionnaires. These are based on a maximum limit that the donor wants to pay, and a fangled system which asks them a series of bizzare questions. After that, the prospective donor is matched against a charity that accepts the level of donation they are willing to pay, whilst checking for compatibility with their innermost emotional and intellectual beliefs. That way, you can find a charity that is right for you both financially and spiritually.

All television advertising for charity is condensed into a sixty second clip which contains black and white images and short clips containing the following:

Starving child, starving dog, starving donkey, sad music, some flies crawling on a baby, a dirty well, a bulldozer clearing the rainforest, thermonuclear war, jam sandwiches, American bombing runs, smiling politicians and a polar-bear drowning as his home melts. Once you've been subjected to this harrowing display of snap-images burning their way into your brain, a website link and telephone number will appear for ten seconds at the end of the commercial, with a voice over provided by Private Joker at the end of Full Metal Jacket.

"I am in a world of shit. But I am alive, and I am not afraid".

Happily, we don't have to go to such terrific lengths, though. Some global corporations have decided to throw profit to the wind and help stop the 4,000 children that die every day from preventable diseases. We can satisfy our grieving consciences by buying fair trade, buying promotional packs, buying less packaging, recycling our old phones (for cash!) and some companies will, gosh darn it, even pay for vaccines. How kind of them.

You see, the thing about this whole sorry lark is that there is some sort of weird heirachy we follow. Someone will sponsor a cute dog at Dog's Trust over a dying child in Africa, because well, you know, dogs are nice. Some heartless bastard would choose to save a Jaguar over a Polar Bear, because, well, bears are dangerous, and the world is probably better without them. Personally, I'd only sponsor a donkey in Africa if someone was actually going to eat it, otherwise I'd rather save real people, please.

But the thing we all seem to be missing these days, as we grate out brains together trying to buy our own food while paying for someone else's, is why are we even expected to have a shred of human decency? We were just fortunate enough to be born into the West, it isn't even our fault. Why should I care about someone in Africa dying if no one else does?

It's funny, when you read those questions, to realize just how abhorrent such a viewpoint is. Of course we should have basic human decency. Of course, if we are able, we should help people who aren't because, after all on a most basic level, wouldn't you just hate to be them? An interesting thought experiment, for anyone wishing to take it, was dreamt up by John Rawls in "A Theory of Justice". He calls it "The Veil of Ignorance", and its an exercise in basic social justice and following your own logic.

You are aware. You know you exist, but everything else is black. You don't know who you are, what country you are from, where you live, who your parents are, the colour of your skin or if you are a man or woman. You don't know the dominant religion, the prevailing social and economic climate. You only know that there is you. So what kind of a world do you want to live in?

Obviously, because there is the chance that you could end up as anything, you wouldn't want an unequal world. You'd want wealth shared. You'd want non-discrimination based on social, religious, ethnic, gender, economic, and pretty darn much just any lines.

But the weirdest question we don't ask ourselves is, why do other people hold these views? Why do we have people in this country who cling to notions of nationalism, and sit on hoarded gold while someone else dies in a dustball we've never even heard of? Why do we tolerate it? Why do we pay the conscience tax on their behalf? Lets go back to Pampers.

Pampers will buy one tetanus vaccine for every pack of Pampers that is sold. A pack of Pampers nappies, if memory serves, is about four quid. According to the same advert, a tetanus jab costs about five pence, probably less. There are millions of cases globally every year, and hundreds of thousands of fatalities. But it costs just five pence to treat. It is a preventable disease.

Proctor and Gamble, which owns Pampers, is a Fortune 500 company. It has earned $3.31 billion dollars in profit in just one quarter. It could, should it desire, eradicate tetanus so badly that it would probably be erased from history and remembered only as "that thing what killed people". Another example is that an MP is paid £65,000 per year plus "allowances to cover the costs of running an office and employing staff, having somewhere to live in London and in their constituency, and travelling between Parliament and their constituency." Now, my maths is a little bit shakey but for £65,000, or just one year's pay for an MP, you could sponsor over 30,000 children (at £2 a go) for one month. Or you could sponsor one child to live for 2,500 years, and set him up as some sort of wise and benevolent God-Emperor of humanity. But whatever.

So for the meantime, I suppose we should all keep chucking money to our favourite causes. But if you ever get a chance to look back and wonder if you're doing everything you can, just have a think about the people who are doing nothing at all.