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We all hear of people enduring marathons, fasts, ice-baths and skydives to all to raise money for the less fortunate. If people are prepared to face pain, suffering and trauma in order to help the starving, then why should sentimental suffering be excluded?
I'm imagining mass burnings in public places
- large numbers of people who have sought thousands in sponsorships and who now watch their sacred memories perish. I see black and white wedding photographs, tear-jerking childhood memories and the last remaining pictures of late relatives hiss, crackle and blacken in the flames as the onlookers mourn.
A sacrifice as great as this would deserve very large donations - it may hurt, but it's for the best. Do you really care for aged, diseased and disadvantaged? Then prove it! Burn your family album!
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Would happily burn all photos of me, for the price of a match. Photos of my family, no. |
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Surely one of the points of charity is that we get an emotion feelgood factor from doing it? |
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Maybe reverse it then. For every $100, you'll save one of my precious memories from the flames and save a starving child. Nah, still doesn't really work. |
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+1 for a newbie for suggesting something so emotive (is that a word?) |
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I have heaps of stuff that was so important to my family that I just cannot burn/scrap easily |
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welcome to hb, berno (is that a pun?) |
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[moomintroll] - I understand, but as time passed I'm sure we could come to terms with our loss and the hurt would surely be replaced by the feelgood factor of having helped other at the cost of personal sacrifice. Although the burning would be difficult, it would be the right thing to do if was to help the starving. |
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That wasn't quite my point (welcome to the HB, by the way!). What I meant was that we give partly because it makes us feel good about ourselves. We undergo physical hardship and thereby we gain emotional satisfaction. It's a selfish interpretation, sure, but giving to charity is an emotional gain. To turn it into a loss is to lose a big incentive to be charitable. What you're asking for sounds like quite a big abnegation of self. |
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The symbolism is kind of ambiguous, too - prove you care by getting rid of people you care about! Oh, you did... well, that was pretty heartless. |
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Apart from that, with what [po] said earlier. Nice to see someone tackling something touchy-feely. |
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[Po], [moomintroll] thankyou for your welcome - it's an honor to finally contribute to the HB, instead of just reading! |
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[moomintroll] - I suppose (all humor aside) I agree with you in that a loss is no incentive to be charitable. My idea could well be extended to 'kill your mother for charity' (maybe my next HB contribution... perhaps not), but we won't even go there. And yes, there is ambiguity and you pointed out. |
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Nevertheless, I'd be interested to know whether this alternative genre of charity fund-raiser would attract greater sponsorships than the cliched 'bathing in cold baked beans' and 'everyone has lots of fun' type affair. |
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Although I understand and agree, in some measure, with your reasoning, berno. I'm voting against this because you wouldn't just be sacrificing something that was precious to you, you'd also be denying your descendants access to a bit of their unique family history. Your grandchildren would never be able to leaf through those grainy old photos and ask if that was really you in the picture. |
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Looking through old family photos is something special, and, since I know first-hand how horrible it is to lose photographs and other meaningful things in a fire, I could never conceive doing the same thing to my children/grandchildren etc. |
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But fair play to you for trying to put a different spin on giving to charity. |
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Hmmm, I prefer the alternative that the title suggests, which is to collect all the moneys to "burn" your family album, and then simply digitise the photos and record them onto digital media such as a CD or DVD. |
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Oh, z_t, but looking at a digitised copy of an old photo is nowhere near as personal an experience as holding the original, I'd say. |
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But I guess I'm old-fashioned when it comes to that sort of thing. |
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Thank god. I skim-read that title and missed out the word 'album'. It's much better now. [World]'s reversed versiom might work, but it reminds me uncomfortably of the 'Save Toby' appeal. |
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[salachair] you are 100% right - but taking a digital backup copy on CD is still preferable to setting everything on fire, yet both actions can be described as "burning", allowing you to collect money for charity in the way described in the idea without losing your most treasured sentimental possessions and simultaneously avoiding prosecution under the trade descriptions act. |
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I am a fool. *Burning*. I get it now. |
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Serves me right for reading and annotating when I should have been memorising my employer's strategic aims and objectives. |
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making a big sacrafice is a well intended gesture, but doesn't actually achieve much. If you really want to help, maybe as well as making a big symbolic gesture of sacrafice, you could actually give the sacraficed item to someone who really needs it. |
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Maybe give all your worldy goods to a starving malawian. In fact, why move all your stuff over there, the starving malawian can come here, live in your house, spend your money, buy pizza, go to the cinema. In exchange, you can pop over to malawi, enjoy the idyllic lake setting. Everyone's happy. |
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I suspose the length of this arrangement would be up to the individuals involved. Just long enough for a good feed and a bit of a holiday? something a bit more permenant, enough time for your replacement to get a good education, enough time for you to build your perfect hideaway retreat? |
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I suppose some kind of citizen swap, much like a university exchange programme. |
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hmmm, i think i might have gone off the subject slightly... |
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