Let's Make A Difference?

On at least a basic level, we all try to be activists. We donate our old clothing to goodwill; we give money to charity when we can; we Facebook post; or, as I'm going to talk about, we buy products that supposedly endorse a cause. You see it all the time, some product that says they'll give a little bit to charity- and it's just a few cents more! It always seems great, buying something and doing good, but how much good are you really doing. Not that much, arguably.

Let's look at this through the pink ribbon campaign. So many things are pink and marketed of breast cancer awareness, but so few of them actually give anything. You don't actually need to do anything for breast cancer to make your product pink. Even those that do give, don't give much at all. You could much more effectively donate to breast cancer research and make a difference by actually donating to breast cancer research. So why do companies effectively lie about their charitable actions (or, at the very least, misrepresent them)? People buy more. Companies make a killing by pretending to be charitable and consumers feel better about themselves for "doing something for the cause".

If you want to give money to breast cancer research, do it, but don't think that you're doing so effectively by buying pink products.

This phenomenon isn’t actually unique to what we buy. A lot of our activism and charitable giving is done from a figurative armchair.The problem with this is that we’re complacent with what we do to the point that charities not only receive less, but, without realizing, we give or work for some pretty ineffective or even downright bad groups because they either hide some shady stuff, effectively self promote, or are generally promoted by society in the same way pink products are (or a mixture of all of the above). We’re not only manipulated into not making that much of a difference, we’re also manipulated into thinking that we have made a difference.

Anyhow, I’m going to stop here, but I gave a 15 minute speech to my entire school about armchair activism last year and, if you’re interested, you can check out the text- https://docs.google.com/document/d/16esln9nK-JeVBXYc3PQ-JazJJMjYxzzhxIvfDZBJg98/edit