As long as I’m in the mood to curmudgeon (if I may coin a verb) I might as well voice a few more things that irritate me. For starters, this week it was revealed that Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple computers, has taken a sick leave from his role in the company. His background is that he was and still is by all appearances, a rock ribbed and unapologetic hippie. He practiced all the “right” things for that lifestyle such as eating health foods, doing his mantras, and visiting the “hippie holyland” India to bathe in the sacred Ganges to help his Karma. What is little known is that he is a pancreatic cancer “survivor” but something has now surfaced to require his urgent attention which may be a recurrence of the cancer. But I want to highlight that despite all his efforts to eat healthily and feed his good Karma he still got sick and perhaps terminally. The morale of this is that if it was as easy as eating tofu, chanting mantras, and visiting holy lands, we could all live forever with the right effort and this clearly is just another delusion that many people labor under and a form of penance which is nothing more than another brand of superstition which deludes so man that they can somehow do something to change the future, your luck, Karma, pre-destination or whatever name you want to put on it. The fact is that if you are going to do something do it because it’s the right thing to do not because you expect to benefit from it somehow. And may I point out that because these are spiritual or “karmic” experiences doesn’t excuse them for being practiced for selfish reasons. They are just as “me oriented” as the Bernie Madoff of any other Wall Street executive who tries to hit it big. And the fact that Madoff may live to be a centenarian and Jobs will die comparatively young bears no moral lesson either because they did what they did because they thought they’d benefit from it and let the chips fall where they may. No more, no less.
Another thing that’s been getting under my skin as time wears on is how many people are out there with their hands out. Let’s draw up a cursory list for starters; I get phone calls and letters from the PBA, the Red Cross, Heart Association, various societies for retarded and disabled people, Father Flanagan’s Boys Town, political causes from both ends of the spectrum, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, volunteer firemen, ambulance corps, disabled veterans, religious groups of all faiths, and that’s just he beginning. Then my doorbell rings for donations for little league, midget football, Junior Achievement, the Jaycees, Sierra Club, Audubon Society, and at the supermarket it’s the Rotary Club, Lions Club, American Legion, and a lot of others we never heard of on the local level. At work they used to twist our arms to donate to the United Way – which by the way, according to those who keep track of these philanthropies, is the least efficient of them all as it consistently directs only 17% of its income to the charities it supposedly supports. You turn on the TV and every channel has some infomercial about some group hustling us for donations for everything under the sun.
My point is that we have become a nation of beggars and begging is obviously a gigantic international growth industry. If these groups spent one tenth the money they waste on harassing us for alms on the causes they espouse then they’d put themselves out of business.