Doing Good

So, an idea just popped in my head. I'm wearing TOMS shoes. A girl I know was recently wearing TOMS shoes. It's interesting how truly lazy we are and how we like to show off our good deeds.

As most people know, TOMS shoes gives a pair of shoes to poor children (I believe in Africa) for every pair of shoes you buy. I got mine for free at Clinton Global Initiative. They gave every person in attendance a pair. There are TOMS parties where you put designs on the shoes and everything.

I have nothing against the people who make TOMS. By all means, they're doing a great service. I have something against the people who buy TOMS and think they're making a difference. In actuality, they're just buying a commodity, and it just so happens that they're helping someone at the same time. People buy TOMS shoes thinking they're helping a poor child and do nothing after that. It's interesting that people are most interested in helping someone out when they get something in return.

The perfect example is from when I worked at a grocery store. We used to hold drives and would ask the person buying their items if they wanted to donate a dollar to Breat Cancer or Colon Cancer, things along those lines. People right and left would deny us (especially the people who bought hundreds of dollars worth of groceries, like an extra dollar would break their budgets). Because we weren't getting a lot of money, we started giving incentives to give money. We would give away slices of cake, some bottles of water, anything. We saw a dramatic rise in donations when there was some type of reward involved.

Very few people volunteer. A lot of high schoolers volunteer, but most of them volunteer to look good on their college applications, not to actually help another. My roommate is going on a medical mission trip. I think he's going to pad his resume for medical school. It's sickening. It takes all of the humanity out of humanitarian aid. Although, yes, they are helping a small bit, they should be helping for the sake of other people, not themselves.

I am volunteering next year at Planned Parenthood. I'm not doing it for the resume building, I'm not doing it to get service hours for some organization. I'm doing it because I want to help people who actually need help. I want to do Teach for America not because it looks good on a law school application, but because I've grown up privileged enough to go to good schools but I know the horrors of inner city public schools. I want to first give back to a system that gave me my education, and second give the children who didn't have the opportunities that I had a chance to receive them.

In high school, I didn't volunteer at all. First I was lazy. Second, I didn't want to be like all the other people volunteering with no heart, just for the gold star by their name. But really, they were better than me. Although they weren't in the right place, they were at least out there. They were getting something done. They might have put in the required 100 hours and been gone, but that was a 100 more hours than I helped.

So this post had two points. First, I wish that people would donate, time or money. Both are small sacrifices made for the benefit of those less fortunate. Second, even if you're volunteering for all the wrong reasons, I have to give you props for being out there. It's actually wonderful to see people helping out, for whatever reason. I just think it's better when your heart is in the right place.