You heard it last week: Donate your meal to Oxfam to feed the hungry. You're hearing it again: Give up your dinner to save the Earth. Does anyone else not understand this brand of "activism"?
Ending world hunger and preserving the earth are absolutely noble causes, in fact probably two of the noblest I can think of. No one deserves to die of starvation, and I am all for preserving the majesty and beauty of our planet as long as possible. So why am I leery of these dining hall campaigns?
Last week I opted not to jump on the Oxfam bandwagon because it seemed kind of silly that Oxfam was only going to get two dollars or so from my skipping dinner at Campus Club. I might as well just have given them the $5 I would have dropped on a Whopper meal at Burger King. And, though I do not eat in the dining halls any more, it seemed piercingly ironic to me to see the sign near Whig and Clio exhorting Department of Dining Services patrons, "Dine out! Give your meal to the earth!" Considering that, if I were in DDS and gave up my dinner, I'd probably head out to Zorba's for a nice big styrofoam container of those yummy fries, a gyro wrapped in a square yard of waxed paper and a plastic bottle of Coke. And I would be doing this in the name of the Earth.
Does anyone else see a problem here?
Why do campus groups go for the "give up a meal" plan? I guess it's because we students are certainly more than willing to sign away a dinner. All you have to do is write your name, and maybe your social security number, on a piece of paper and that's it — you have an excuse to go eat junk food. And hey, it feels good to be giving that meal to charity, huh? But actually taking the trouble to send a check to the same charity? That's way too much work, not to mention actually having to find out if your charity of choice is legitimate and sends your money where you want it to go rather than into bureaucratic overhead.
OK, so Oxfam and the Nature Conservancy will be getting something out of the donate-your-dinner plan at least, where they would likely get almost nothing soliciting monetary donations. But this sort of half-assed activism does not speak well for us, especially since we are at a school that pledges to be "in the service of all nations." Maybe donating dinner to the earth makes you feel good while you're busy ignoring your gas-guzzling SUV in the parking lot. How convenient. It is a lot harder to actually go out and build houses for Habitat for Humanity than to just sign your name on a sheet of paper and go eat at the Hoagie Haven. But it is real activism.
Perhaps the scariest thing of all is that many of us — the investment bankers, consultants, doctors, lawyers and other wealthy people of the future — are training to be lazy activists. In the future, maybe we will be in a position to write large checks to worthy charities. We just have to make sure that our money goes to the charities themselves and not toward their overhead costs.
I am not a member of the Student Volunteers Council, I admit to being self-centered and the last nice thing I did for anybody was give blood in September. So maybe I should have given my meal to Oxfam, because it's $2 more than the organization would have gotten from me otherwise.
Or maybe this is just the kick in the rear that I need. Stella Daily is a chemistry major from Bensalem, Pa. She can be reached at schdaily@princeton.edu.
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