Alms for everyone?

One day last week, I walked past the library, and a young man in a red checkered button-up ran through the crowd on the steps and approached me. For a second I thought it was my long-lost love from Little League Baseball, Taylor, finally coming to propose. (He tried to give me his glove, but his parents wouldn’t let him.) But then I saw the clipboard. \n“Do you have a minute to help cure hunger, homelessness and global warming?” the young man asked. \nIf this were a Highlights magazine, I would point out two things wrong with this picture (well OK, three if you count the red checkered button-up). The first is – and correct me if I’m wrong – I’m pretty sure a single minute of my time won’t make much of a dent in the fight to cure any one of the three issues on that guy’s clipboard. Perhaps a minute of my time plus a donation of several thousand dollars would help? Or a minute of my time that involves me signing up to donate several years of my time? Maybe. But I’m willing to bet the minute itself wasn’t going to do much good. \nThe second thing is that this guy really needs to pick one thing he’s concerned about and stick to it. On the same day, I came across a handful of distinctly “cool” kids lounging on a living room couch on the sidewalk outside Wright dormitory eating chips, wearing super-cool sunglasses and collecting money for the Red Cross. If they weren’t smoking and drinking, they might as well have been. I was reluctant to give them money because, well, how can you justify trying to collect money for a charity while trying so hard to look cooler than those from which you are asking for money? But at least they had their crap straight and were collecting for solely the Red Cross. This was not the case with Checkered Shirt. Hunger and homelessness together? OK. I suppose I can see that. The two generally go hand in hand. But global warming, too? One can only imagine this guy’s life. I have little doubt that he went home that night and attempted to eat 50 hard-boiled eggs.\nPerhaps what we had there was a failure to communicate, but with an introduction like his, I wasn’t willing to hear the rest of his story. \nMy general take is that there’s too much pressure for us all to be superheroes. We can’t go around feeling guilty about all the issues out there. And we certainly can’t give time and money to all of them. Especially as college students (read: broke people).\nThere are bound to be at least one or two issues that each of us cares about. And if people don’t have any issues they care about, I think that’s fine, too. One’s own life is a pretty important thing. My take is that we should all find the things we actually care about and donate some time to them. Actions, after all, speak louder than a random dollar thrown in a tin can.