Last Friday, Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines. One of the strongest storms ever to make landfall, Haiyan caused thousands of deaths. Thankfully, the president of the Philippines said on Tuesday that the initial estimate of 10,000 dead was probably wrong. Still, the typhoon has killed many and affected at least 10 million.
It’s only human to wonder, “How can I help?” No one can fault you for that. Many send old clothes, toys or anything that might assist those in need. The truth is, though, that your hand-me-downs don’t do anything. If you really want to help out those millions affected by the typhoon, send money.
Our misguided efforts to help point to a much larger, generational malady: In the pursuit of an admirable goal, we often do more harm than good. We reprimand the wrong people, send money to the wrong places — we fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the problem we rightfully want to fix.
Examples abound. The thousands — filmmaker Spike Lee among them — who retweeted an address that they thought belonged to George Zimmerman but actually belonged to an elderly couple. The hundreds who expressed their solidarity with the child soldiers in Uganda by posting the KONY 2012 video to their Facebooks — despite the fact that the documentary got crucial facts wrong, ignored Uganda’s own brutal human rights record and generally patronized and infantilized Africa.
Or, to take a more trivial example, all those who made their Facebook statuses something along the lines of, “In response to the new Facebook guidelines, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, photos, etc.,” unaware that Facebook does not own media on your page nor could a status afford you legal protection if the company did.
The point is, all of the above causes — the exploitation of children, protecting your privacy, aiding those whose lives have been ruined by a storm — are ones people feel strongly about. You’re right to try to help.
But the thing is, helping isn’t easy. And the bigger the problem, the harder it is to address. You can’t save a country by sending your old clothes or composing a tweet. You can’t end a war by posting a video.
It is a symptom of our times, in which Wikipedia and SparkNotes replace hard work and research, a YouTube video of a sneezing panda can be accessed anywhere there’s 3G and your computer or phone takes no more than five seconds to load whatever inane thing you wanted to see.
It is hardly revelatory to say that we are the generation of instant gratification. We want what we want, and we want it now. Fine. There’s no changing that.
But when there is a cause that is worth fighting for, step back for a second, step away from yourself and the unbelievably amazing society we live in. The people we’re often trying to help — in the Philippines, Haiti or Africa — don’t have the luxuries we do. They can’t just order a new house on Amazon. They can’t attract attention to their plight by tweeting about the living hell of being a child soldier.
So you want to help. That’s great. Now, figure out how to make a real difference. It’s going to take more than a minute, but if you care, really care, then it’s worth it.