Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/08/2015 22:10 -0500
With a record 46.7 million Americans living in poverty (9.4 million more than before the financial crisis), it is perhaps not entirely surprising that the need for ‘help’ is surging. However, as NYTimes reports, there is a spreading epidemic on social-media that smacks of anything but providing for the needy – and one man whose mailboxes have been increasingly filled with monetary requests, has a theory about it all – “I think online begging has become the new economy.”
“I woke up to four new people today asking me for money on four different donation platforms,” one friend said. “One was my ex-babysitter announcing her wedding and where I could send cash. No invitation to the wedding. Just cash.”
“I’m a believer in giving to real charities: medical research, school drives, the Red Cross, et cetera,” said Heidi Knodle, owner of a picture framing store in San Francisco. “I’m tired of people asking for a vacation, funds for a wedding or their college tuition.”
Of course, there are plenty of worthy causes and worthy donation recipients, as The New York Times’ Judith Newman explains,
A visit to GoFundMe or YouCaring yields site after site of people whose homes were wiped out by natural disasters. People with diseases I’d never heard of, with no insurance and staggering medical expenses. Kids trying to pay for their parents’ funerals. Parents with seriously ill children wanting a trip to Disney World, and sick animals owned by people who couldn’t afford the vet bills.
One man had set up a fund for a friend who needed to take a couple of months off while his wife died of brain cancer.
But then, there were others. Many, many others…
Education funds are great, but do I really want to pay for a friend to travel to Peru to become a shaman?
Should the woman who has lost a lot of weight (good for you!) ask her friends to pay for $2,500 worth of laser skin tightening? What about the girl seeking $600 for her “personal development journey”? (Not much to ask, but she was so beautiful, I didn’t understand why she didn’t develop herself into a model and make a whole lot more than that.)
Another woman was asking for help with the legal bills for her divorce, as her new husband had bolted to Israel. She was a little dramatic in her plea: “My life — the innocent, carefree life which I had known, and the blissful happy life of hopes and dreams shattered overnight. Instead of partaking of gourmet meals and donning my kalla/bridal trousseau, chaos and turmoil, sprinkled with vicious gossip became my daily food and clothing.”
The requests continued.
Sponsorship for a child’s figure skating lessons from a mother who, according to the friend who got daily reminders to donate, just renovated her kitchen.
Money for a power generator for a guy in Brooklyn who holds parties for artists, writers and musicians in a shack in his backyard, who said he is doing a project on “the history of shacks.”
A talented writer who was having a rough patch put up a “birthday plea” for $2,000 – no, make that $200,000. A guy who needs a new MacBook after someone spilled a drink on his. The woman who just asked for $20,000 for plastic surgery because she had children early and “struggles with body image issues.”
Or take the recent page of Larry Paciotti, a.k.a. the famous pornographic film director/drag queen Chi Chi LaRue, who was asking for $40,000 to extend his stay in rehab at Betty Ford. One non-funder on his funding page called the request “a gross abuse of fame … Larry has plenty of personal resources available to secure this funding on his own.”
And that, of course, is at the heart of the backlash: the sneaking suspicion that someone of considerable (or at least ample) means and/or connections is asking for help.
Here’s the question I can’t stop asking myself: Has social media made our craving for attention and validation overwhelm all other considerations? There is nothing new about asking your friends for help (remember rent parties?), but that help was confined to a small group of people you actually knew.
Now, no such boundaries exist. Your 4,000 Facebook friends should know if you can’t pay for your rent — or your plastic surgery. And who knows? They may just pay up.
There was a time when there were needs, and there were wants, and we knew the difference. Now?
Now I’m not so sure.
Welcome to the new normal… where the Free Stuff Army has now morphed with the cult of narcissism into “The Begging Economy” where everyone expects that a required standard of living – because it’s fair and deserved – should be paid for by someone else… and never ever paid back… and if you disagree, you are an extremist, racist bigot oppressing the minorities and under-privileged who deem the latest iPhone and Caramel Vanilla 3-pump extra-hot fuzzychino to be their forefathers’ given right.
Only 9.4 million more in poverty.
This surprises me, things are better than I thought.
Maybe Obama isn’t so bad after all, think of how bad it would be if a Republican had got in instead.
” …. where the Free Stuff Army has now morphed …” ———— from the article
Stuff? Stuff????? It’s Free SHIT Army, Mr. Durden ….. YA FUCKIN’ PUSSY!!!
GoFundMe? My reply — GoFuckYourself.
Yeah, some of the stories are heartbreaking, BUT … you have ZERO fucking clue whether or not your hard-earned money will be used for what they claim. Zero! Heartless bastard? No. Here’s the deal; CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME. Give local, to people in need whom you know in your community or, at worse, two degrees of separation. There are too many scams in this fucked-up world to give cash to a total stranger thousands of miles away.
What I hate is when you go to a store and they ask you if you want to donate to some fucking cause.
In the past week, Lowes, Autozone, Wendy’s have asked if I wanted to donate. I’m there to buy something, not answer fucking questions.
And then it’s the firemen – carrying around a boot, walking in and out of traffic stopped at the light.
My wife used to give our used clothes to ARC. Now ARC says they ‘sell’ the clothes to some second hand store. Fuck’em we throw it all out now.
A friend of ours was asked (at church) to bring a book for a child / young adult. She brought some her children’s books. Church told her they only wanted new books. Fuck these people also.
At least 2 or 3 times a month there are “beggars” at the front store of the Quik Check (local convenience store); Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, grade school soccer team, high school band members, and on and on. It’s REALLY fucking annoying as hell …. and if you don’t drop something in the cup they look at you like you’re a fucking Taliban terrorist. Fuck ’em.
Also …
…. a couple years ago was the first time Ms Freud donated some clothes to some organization — I think it was some veterans organization. BIG mistake!! You know what those motherfuckers did?? They sold Ms Freud’s phone number to other GimmeFreeShit organizations!! Within months we’re getting begging calls from copfuk organizations, hose monkeys, cancer groups, anti-masturbation defamation league, and on and on. You can’t trust ANY of these people, imho.
I used to give to the United Way until I found out the CEO and other board members were making over a half a million dollars a year in salary.Damn scum bags.They were really helping themselves get rich.
I think a lot of this is plain narcissism.
BB: same with PETA (www.petakillsanimals.com) and the Humane Society (www.humanewatch.org). I don’t give to ANY big corporations. Charities I prefer are Heifer.org (helping people pull themselves out of poverty), http://www.tankafund.org (returning bison to Native people and the plains).
Btw, if you ever see a Tanka Bar at Vitamin Cottage or Whole Foods or wherever, you eat that thing. Think MEAT CANDY. It’s that good.
Certainly a lot of narcissism, but I also think a lot of people are just giving up. That’s what happens when you remove the ability to work hard to achieve something, only to see it ripped away from you. You give up after awhile, especially when you see other people being handed free shit for doing nothing; why should YOU work for it, when no one else has to? The “socialist democrats” think their world is such a utopia, when in fact it’s slavery to a government master.
Case in point: Debi Thomas, former Olympic figure skater had to work extra-hard to make it to the top, but she did. She went on to become a surgeon. Far better than many young black women ever hope to do. Then she got divorced twice and the financial hits she took bankrupted her (a story we hear mainly about men, but it happens to rich women, too). She totally gave up — lives in a trailer in Appalachia now, engaged to a drunkard. Has no interest in practicing medicine any more. What did she resort to? Begging online: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/olympic-skater-debi-thomas-broke-bug-infested-trailer-article-1.2426720
I have no sympathy for her, but I do see it as yet another case in point of someone who has the ability to succeed throwing it all in. Everyone is losing hope these days.
Thinker,
I would argue that it is all but impossible to have hope for a better future in a world run by psychopaths and sociopaths.
Yesterday I was wondering to myself how this country got so fucked up. My first thought was to ask myself how corporate chieftains could outsource millions of middle class American jobs to low-wage foreign countries, while they destroyed the economic livelihoods of their fellow countrymen and women in the process.
The answer that popped into my head is that the people running the corporations are sociopaths and psychopaths. They really don’t give a fuck about you, me, their own grandmothers, or the country.
Then I asked myself why the politicians sat idly by and watched it happen. The answer is that they were bought off by the corporations. What a surprise! The politicians are sociopaths and psychopaths too. They don’t give a fuck about you, me, their own grandmothers, or the country. If they did, they would not be in the process of completing the destruction of the US economy by turning over the country to the corporations via TTP, TTIP, and TISA.
I suspect this country is too far gone to fix by peaceful means. To fix this country will require bullets, not ballots. That will happen only after the bread and circuses stop working, i.e. economic collapse.
So the only sensible approach is to brace for impact.
I saw a video plea for people to send money to a GoFundMe site by former Olympic figure skater Debbie Thomas. Evidently Ms. Thomas did not spend all the money she made from endorsements deals after becoming the first black athlete to win any type of medal in the Winter Olympics and was the one time world champion in her sport very wisely. Ms. Thomas graduated from Stanford University and ultimately became an orthopedic surgeon after her skating days were over. Today she is unemployed, living in a trailer park somewhere and is flat broke. She has resorted to pleading with people to give her money so she can get her life back. Please, this kind of shit pisses me off.
You can just see how this will become the new model for people that have had some success and have somehow pissed it all away on dependency or cavalier spending or what have you. Just put out a pitiful video asking people to be sympathetic to your plight and help get you back on your feet again. It is a sad state of affairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gFvxNqkw9_U
Orthopedic surgeon? Why can’t she work? If she’s worth a hoot as a surgeon, somebody would hire her in a clinic. Gotta be more than “She’s broke.”