Every day the mail carrier delivers a fresh clutch of solicitations. They arrive as a steady stream of appeals to guilt or preemptive exchanges of value for donations, or even a little bit of both from the more sophisticated of the bunch. Many come from organizations I donate to yearly, but for whatever reason feel the need to solicit me monthly, sometimes what feels like weekly. It’s excessive. Extrapolated over the course of year, I fear the amount of money charities collectively spend on solicitations are greater than the amount I donate in return. It’s hard to understand how the approach is tenable. Maybe the appeals yield enough response over time to justify the expense or there is a cadre of benefactors who in practice underwrite most charities and the solicitations are nothing more than mere marketing, a ploy to be present in the collective mind-space. Then again there are cheaper ways of marketing, so maybe not.
In the last few weeks alone I’ve received enough greeting cards and return address labels to acknowledge every friend and acquaintance’s life achievement, birthday, or anniversary for the next ten years. I have probably something on the order of 500 return address labels for the two or three pieces of mail I send a year. The return address labels I have on hand today will outlive me by many many (many) years. I’m certain there is a special landfill somewhere in America where all of the return address labels and blank greeting cards with charity imprints on the back cover are amassed in bulk from all prospective donors to decompose slowly, each season exacting a different corrosive effect, before they are nothing again. I imagine it forming a mountain of paper, a few thousand feet high and hundreds of miles wide, collectively encompassing a million little stories of venerable ideas pitched to people and discarded with rote efficiency. A manifest landmark to omnipresent needs and shrugs of indifference.
That doesn’t mean I’ll stop donating to the causes I care about and neither should you. There is something about the holiday season that focuses our collective attention on glaring economic and social divisions. Many organizations are out there daily, grinding away at Sisyphean tasks, and I haven’t lost the hope that one day some will get to the top of their veritable hills and find solace for us on the other side. I just hope all mail and solicitations in the service of raising funds haven’t displaced any of their core missions. And I wouldn’t mind receiving less of the same mail as well.
