Charity, my friend

Most charitable acts require one to ‘give’ than to ‘take’: giving time through voluntary social work, if one could not afford the philanthropist’s limelight of donating a larger than life cardboard cheque in glamorous charity event, or during another flag day, unwilling to drop a few shillings into the tin cans (the tin cans which are the essential anatomical distinction of many good, obedient students). The latter act of giving – to perform varying degrees of monetary Providence – is especially hard for misers and selfish-big spenders, of various social ranks, with traces of sympathetic feelings, to follow.

Of late, I have noticed one opposite act of ‘taking’ from this culture itself that could help balance the morality-conscience guilt scales of all misers and selfish-big spenders -scales that are tilt, too much, to the metaphysical security of having fat bank accounts and the material comfort of excessive wasteful consumption, respectively. But before I introduce this group that we could perform the act on, let us give this group of people a name (a name which definitely isn’t their ‘true names’ in the Joubertian sense): the leaflet distributors.

The leaflet distributors are noticeable in the busy train stations and shopping malls. Much too noticeable, in fact, that we can detect and circumvent them like the many other obstacles to the commuter-ant movement algorithm during the rush hours in bus interchanges and train stations –
or like misplaced decorative rocks, getting in the way of those leisure Sunday strolls of families, friends or couples in their chosen commodity gardens. Sharing the public space, more or less, as stationery objects with handicap buskers or tissue-peddlers, the leaflet distributors, like the taxi-drivers – who, ironically, are always on the move – are not homogenous. They are made up of individual from all walks of life. The leaflet distributors includes students, delinquents, housewives, retirees, jobless middles age men, most probably suffering from mid-life crisis. (Here, homogeneity, instead, would be attributed to other groups such as the contra-band cigarette-peddlers with common profile amongst them: male, of a certain age range, and social statuses of either foreign workers or illegal immigrants - that are just foreign workers who have reached ‘expiry dates’ on their work permits. This explains their role as social bacteria and germs that threaten the health of the rest of the social body upon interaction or exchange. In other words, they are the pseudo-cause of the pseudo-diarrhoea from consuming pseudo-milk that has pseudo-expired.)

Like the commuters and shoppers, the chief occupation of the leaflet distributors are ‘perfunctory’, the configuration is hardly complex. Although we are not interested in the advertisement in the leaflet; and although from the amount of paper litters, we have every reason to hate or despise them as part of the gang who cut trees or bulldozed rainforests, but by ‘taking’ one or two leaflets from them, we are definitely assisting them to end the banal existence where movement is reduced to that of a mechanical dolls in malls. By accepting the leaflet and crushing it into the next rubbish bin, it is more or less equivalent to clearing your own rubbish on the table of a fast food restaurant. From what I know they are not paid by the hours but by the amount of leaflets distributed, therefore by helping them, we are shortening their torture of standing under the sun outside the mall or suffocated by the lack of air or bad air in the station.

However, by introducing ‘taking’ (receiving or accepting) to those who are not susceptible to ‘giving’ (and rejecting), another problem arises: lazy bums who are too lazy to even do this minor task, of taking and throwing the leaflet since the distributors are not allow to do it themselves, to alleviate somebody else’s pain. But before we move on to the problematic of laziness, its pros and cons to be dealt in depth in the next section, I would like to briefly mention the consequences of laziness. A case in point, it is because we are lazy to walk, and we came up with the excuse that we need to move faster and other big reasons that has got to do with civilisation, that car was eventually invented. Therefore, we must be reminded that fatal car crash, one of the most ignoble ways to leave the world has laziness as one of its primary causes. It is because we are lazy that car crash existed!