When I was 15 my mom drove me to a job interview on Goshen Rd. I’d found the company’s ad in the classifieds; they were looking for people with good telephone presence, and at 15 that was pretty much my main skill. A lot of other events have faded in Mom’s memory but she still recalls (mostly) that one, when she heard my strange galumphing walk and looked in her review mirror to see me rounding the car for the passenger seat.
“They wanted to send blind kids to the movies!” I said as I slammed the door.
Her recollection is wrong on one count. What they ostensibly wanted to do was send “sight-impaired disadvantaged youth” to the circus. The job interview itself consisted of the applicant being handed a photocopy of a page of the local phone book and a script from which you could not deviate AT ALL. If you made one “sale” in 15 minutes you got to stay for another 15 and so on, until they got at least an hour’s free work out of you. As someone well-acquainted with my own hourly value thanks to babysitting pretty much every Saturday night I saw through that tactic, but still gamely went along with the first 15 minutes. I think I thought that I’d be so wonderful they’d hire me without the subsequent trial periods. I was 15. I went through the mealy-mouthed script but on the third read-through I realised what we were asking for money for, and how ridiculous it really was. What joy is there at a circus if you can’t see it? A lot of loud confusing noises, the urine-gamey funk of animals confined to quarters, let out only to prance in geegaws that looked foolish enough on the people. A circus without sight is stink and cacophony. With sight it is stink, cacophony and clowns. But really there wouldn’t be blind children going to any circus because once all the donations got apportioned out to the various people behind the scenes maybe one cent of every dollar went toward the circus fund. Those people could raise money forever and still not afflict one sightless kid with the horror of Barnum’s Folly.
I think of that scam often when people bring up charities. Livestrong is another example of yet another charity that has gone the way of the blind circus kids. Maybe now that Lance has been debracleted they can actually give money to cancer research again.
I also think of the blind kid show scam when I read about strange causes. Just now I went to the Ben & Jerry’s website to nominate that my favourite flavour–Wavy Gravy–be recalled to life. Sadly, I did a little research and see that the flavour was recalled because it was “not cost-effective”. The hippie who lent his name to the concoction contracted to have all the profits donated to send homeless kids to camp. Which is just weird. Camp is not a life essential. Camp is an extra. If these kids don’t even have a home, why are we sending them to CAMP? Don’t they already camp all the time? “Hey! You know what you’d love?! A couple of nights in a tent in the woods!” They get to be homeless with s’mores.
I know I don’t like circuses and I don’t like camping so there’s that. But in both cases I think it’s all ridiculous, yet the older I get the more I realise that people will do any number of ridiculous things for any number of ridiculous reasons. Like writing a blog.
Oh, Wavy Gravy is your favorite flavor, too? I miss it mightily.
I don’t share your disdain for camp for homeless kids. I loved camping, and I don’t see why children who want the experience should be deprived of it because they also don’t have homes. It’s like saying “your leg is broken, so we aren’t going to bother combing your hair.”
I just think they’d rather have a home first. To me it’s more like saying “oh your leg is broken? We won’t put a cast on it, but you’ll feel better with this cane.”
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
Or, “oh your leg is broken? Here’s this ice cream cone, then keep walking around with your broken leg.”
Sorry, I can’t see it. Children are homeless because of natural disaster or because their parents have fallen on hard times, economically or psychologically. And you’re saying that until the disaster is fixed, or the economy turns around, or the parents solve all their emotional problems, the kids can’t have cookies. You’re also saying that Wavy Gravy (the person) needs to focus on what you see as the main problem and not on what he thinks he can handle fixing. Now, really, how can you be so mean to the man who inspires hazlenut icecream with fudge?
Yes. I am saying that. It’s probably a sociocultural thing but yeah. The kinds don’t get cookies if the parents can’t hand them out.
You fix the problem before you have the party. That’s how I was raised and that’s how I see the world.
This is kind of the same argument I had with New Orleans people raising funds to throw a party a year or so after Katrina. I’m still of the opinion that you rebuild the houses before you fix some historic fountain and get drunk in the streets. The NO people talk about me not having sympathy for their culture. That’s true to a point. I have sympathy for you but I think some aspects of your culture are careless and imprudent.
Same with this. I understand the argument that Wavy Gravy Camp would be a respite for the kid. Maybe. I’m not willing to believe that there aren’t homeless kids who would just hate camp. But anyway, yeah. I’d rather get one homeless kid and her family into an apartment than I would send 50 kids to camp.
Happily, I am not the boss of Mr. Gravy. If he wants to band-aid the gaping wounds of a couple dozen ForTheChildren he’s welcome to. I cant stop him.
But my world is one where the barn gets built before you have the hoedown.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
I get the irony of sending homeless kids to camp. It’s like putting a starving person on a diet. But that’s if you only go with the notion that camp=something rich people do to learn to rough it without their luxuries. Kid camps (that I’ve been to) provide shelter and three meals a day, plus fun activities. I think this could be a good thing if it allows parents to go out and arrange for work or shelter w/o having to cope with making sure their kids are fed.
That’s a good point. I can see it as alternative child care.
I still have two wagonloads of anti-camp prejudice that it’s hard to get past but that argument is the easiest one for me to countenance.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
Camps also can (and I emphasize can; I have no idea whether Mr. Gravy’s camp does) teach a bunch of useful, real-world, you’ll-be-glad-to-have-had-this-experience-when-you-grow-up skills to kids. For example, my husband was a camp counselor for many years, and edited the camp newspaper, and found that a surprising number of the kids who wrote for that paper went on to have careers in journalism. I think that providing training that middle-class children take for granted and homeless children almost never have access to is not a bad thing — if nothing else, it can help them crawl out of the hole they’re in.
Someone else who hates circuses! Stink, cacophony and clowns–exactly. (clowns….*shivers*)
Now tell me you find ice cream trucks creepy and I will know we are soul sisters.
Yeah, really. Circus clowns and ice cream trucks really ARE creepy. And why would anybody want to punish those poor blind kids by sending them to a circus in the first place? And let’s not even start up with the camps. I live in Germany.
I do agree with NM on the camp for homeless kids thing. Not camp specifically, but on providing a “luxury” experience. It’d be preferable to give the child a home, but likely cost-prohibitive. Hosting a camp for a bunch of kids is likely a lot cheaper than buying them each a home. It doesn’t solve their problem, but it gives them a break from it and a chance to be a kid for awhile and that counts for a lot.
Yeah, these days it’s hard not to be cynical about a lot of charity work. Putting on bandaids because it’s too expensive to afford medicine, and giving medicine because it’s hard to impossible to get people to stop injuring themselves, or make a less hazardous world. It makes a person really think on whether or not they are helping, or just treading water. When it isn’t fraudulent, like your experience.
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