I don't feel compelled to buy every car.or to fix every problem. Helping someone else's kids doesn't feel any more like 'throwing money away' than helping mine. Smaller budgets solve smaller problems, but at any scale (above the level of struggling to pay rent and feed kids), the same principles apply. Every once in a while I'll buy a car, computer, or bigger problem solved. I might buy milk, eggs, a few magazines, and a small problem or two solved. It's no different, in other words, from any other sort of shopping. And the interesting thing is that buying solutions to problems which happen to be external to us feels equally satisfying. Most purchases are intended to solve problems of various sorts, and there's a satisfaction in that. Paying money to buy improvement to a given situation is what consumerism is all about. And donations ought to be viewed as consumption. After all, we don't throw up our hands and refuse to buy books or movies because we 'can't buy them all' (and might easily drain our coffers in so trying). There's nothing wrong with budgeting in hard limits, as we do with other expenditures. The mark of a selfish person is a fear of being overly generous. Second, that fear stems from pure selfishness. First of all, that simply won't happen (except in our overblown fantasies of sainthood). Why forego assistance we can provide just because there's much we can't? Behind this feeling of futility is the fear that one could easily drain one's coffers aiming to help each and every problem out there. So it's irrational to surrender to feelings of futility and do nothing. This problem, in other words, is one I noticed, cared about, and can help solve.a little.Īs for not being able to 'help them all', true. And today I happen not to have hunger or disease on my mind it's Tchaikovsky. It was this one that caught my attention. I didn't happen to get emotionally involved in the story of some other school. Here's the trick to getting through that: just help what you bump into. Sort of the way tourists in India quickly learn to stop giving coins to the multitudes of beggars carrying starving babies. So it would be very easy to haplessly throw up my arms and decline to help, given the enormity of it all. And there are more important problems in the world than this (e.g. And there are myriad brilliant kids who've been forced to abandon their dreams. There are myriad similar situations in schools all over the country. I could afford to endow a couple of kids into the orchestra who can't afford the $55, or maybe donate a couple of used violas.īut here's where the conundrum arises. I get caught up in stories like this.and want to help. (Before you read on, please give that Times article a read. And this is one of the lucky cases many schools these days have no music program at all. The orchestra's teetering the school system offers little support, doesn't provide instruments, and kids must actually pay-to-play - a $55 fee for the school year which some can't afford. top violinist), a brilliant teenager, is living on her own and being forced by circumstance to abandon her dreams. I read the NY Times story about how these are mostly poor kids, and how the concertmaster (i.e. of a superb high school orchestra from Ohio playing Tchaikovsky with tons of heart-breaking soul in a national competition (they tied for runner-up). There's a standard do-gooder's conundrum, which I can illustrate via a real world example.

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