Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Love and the Ascending Aorta
The other day I saw some pink ladies advertising along a street. They were waving signs, one of which read something to the effect of “If You (heart) (puerile slang for a certain body part), Donate!”
What times we live in, when grown women employ in public the vocabulary of the junior-high locker room.
Let us, for the sake of the gentle readership of this excellent newspaper, say that the endangered body part was the ascending aorta. It wasn’t, of course, and naughty little boys don’t snicker and giggle at slang expressions about the ascending aorta. One does not hear “Wow, think what her ascending aorta must be like – man, I can almost palpate the palpitations of her atrial fibrillation now!”
“Yeah, dude, her ascending aorta, like, y’know, gets me so into ventrical tachycardia!”
However, for the sake of discussion let the ascending aorta serve as our Maltese Chickadee.
No one is as supportive of ascending aortas as I. Sometimes friends and even strangers approach me to ask what I think of ascending aortas, and I always express my enthusiastic approbation. Ascending aortas are nifty, and I think everyone ought to have one or two of them. I’m even thinking of sporting a little lapel pin, a tiny little ascending aorta with a happy face.
However, no appeals for money have ever been the sequelae to conversations I’ve had with folks – and I know you have too – about merry little ascending aortas: “You like healthy ascending aortas, Mr. H? Why, so do I. Give me some money and I’ll see to it that there are healthier ascending aortas in the world.”
In sum and in short and all in all and at the end of the day the bottom line is that when the skinny lady sings I see no reason to stop my car in a busy street in order to give money to complete strangers, no matter how pink they are, simply because they maintain that this act will somehow make the world a better place for ascending aortas.
Who says my dollar will provide a meal or something for an ascending aorta? Who? If someone gives money, someone is receiving money. And who is that receiver? Is there some starving, bespectacled scientist down to his last test-tube and his last packet of Ramen noodles in some FEMA trailer laboratory, a starving, bespectacled scientist just on the cuspidor or bicuspid or something of discovering a cure for honey-glazed ascending aortas, a starving, bespectacled scientist to whom the beggars will happily fly at the end of the day with their salvific buckets of healing money for the rectification of faulty ascending aortas?
Another question is this: when did we become a nation of beggars?
The ascending aorta ladies were begging perhaps up the road from the safe-graduation beggars (because, as we all know, putting young people into the street is so safe for them, and having them beg teaches them such valuable life-lessons) and maybe down the road from the send-my-something-team-to-the-state-championship-something-playoffs-in-some-other-city beggars.
Once upon a time, in a quaint ye olde USA when the world trembled at the might of our washers and dryers, Boy Scouts washed one’s windshield for quarters safely off the road, cheerleaders washed the rest of the car safely in a church parking lot, the Sunday school / CCD class safely peddled homemade cakes after church / Mass, and the marching band sold muffins safely in front of the grocery store. The Boy Scouts might have scratched the car’s windshield, the cheerleaders might have scratched the car’s paint, the band’s muffins might have scratched the lining of one’s stomach, and the Sunday school / CCD cakes – well, actually, those were quite good -- but the point is that the young’uns’ parents and sponsors required their charges to practice work, not beggary.
More importantly, parents taught their children to stay away from the street lest they get run over or abducted. You might say those parents had a heart, ascending aorta and all.
-30-
Showing posts with label Operation Graduation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Operation Graduation. Show all posts
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
A Nation of Beggars
Mack Hall
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
- E. Y. Harburg, 1931
One pities the dozens of beggars in decaying third-world countries who line the roads with their cans out and who importune the traveler in parking lots. I’m speaking of the USA, of course.
Last Saturday in Beaumont a large pickup truck pulled up next to me and the driver grinned at me with her remaining teeth and assured me she wasn’t going to hurt me. When the first words from a stranger are that she’s not going to hurt you, you know you’ve made a friend.
My new friend said her husband had abused her, and showed me a band-aid on her arm to prove it. He was now in jail, she said, and assured me that she was a country girl, and I said no and rolled up my window; she still had some teeth, and they looked dangerous when bared. I didn’t catch the rest of her monologue, but I don’t think it was a blessing. She then drove around the parking lot trying to make new friends, but with little success.
In most countries the beggars don’t drive newer and bigger cars than the beggees, but, hey, we’re a shining parking lot on a hill.
More beggars lined the road at many intersections on the way home, asking for money for a catalogue of good causes. In one small town a number of young people begged for money so that they might enjoy a safe graduation night. I, for one, am unclear on the concept of teens standing in the middle of a four-lane highway in traffic so that they might be safe on some other occasion.
“Hey, kid, here’s…oops! Watch out for that 18-wheeler! Here’s a dollar. Be safe.”
Instead of money perhaps we could give them advice: “Hey, kid, don’t get drunk and drive after you graduate, okay? There might be some other kid standing in the road begging for money.”
Recently I looked up on www.charitynavigator.org a charity that had suddenly become fashionable, and, hey, who wouldn’t want to help a harp seal / abandoned piranha / little human? I made no friends when I pointed out that the president and CEO of the charity takes an annual rake-off of over $300,000 and that another fellow, listed as the former president and CEO, helps himself to another $300,000 every year.
The line between generosity and cynicism is a thick one. If a child is hungry, feed the child. If a man asks you for money for a hungry child and the man’s keeping $300,000 for himself, don’t give it to him.
Give it to me.
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
- E. Y. Harburg, 1931
One pities the dozens of beggars in decaying third-world countries who line the roads with their cans out and who importune the traveler in parking lots. I’m speaking of the USA, of course.
Last Saturday in Beaumont a large pickup truck pulled up next to me and the driver grinned at me with her remaining teeth and assured me she wasn’t going to hurt me. When the first words from a stranger are that she’s not going to hurt you, you know you’ve made a friend.
My new friend said her husband had abused her, and showed me a band-aid on her arm to prove it. He was now in jail, she said, and assured me that she was a country girl, and I said no and rolled up my window; she still had some teeth, and they looked dangerous when bared. I didn’t catch the rest of her monologue, but I don’t think it was a blessing. She then drove around the parking lot trying to make new friends, but with little success.
In most countries the beggars don’t drive newer and bigger cars than the beggees, but, hey, we’re a shining parking lot on a hill.
More beggars lined the road at many intersections on the way home, asking for money for a catalogue of good causes. In one small town a number of young people begged for money so that they might enjoy a safe graduation night. I, for one, am unclear on the concept of teens standing in the middle of a four-lane highway in traffic so that they might be safe on some other occasion.
“Hey, kid, here’s…oops! Watch out for that 18-wheeler! Here’s a dollar. Be safe.”
Instead of money perhaps we could give them advice: “Hey, kid, don’t get drunk and drive after you graduate, okay? There might be some other kid standing in the road begging for money.”
Recently I looked up on www.charitynavigator.org a charity that had suddenly become fashionable, and, hey, who wouldn’t want to help a harp seal / abandoned piranha / little human? I made no friends when I pointed out that the president and CEO of the charity takes an annual rake-off of over $300,000 and that another fellow, listed as the former president and CEO, helps himself to another $300,000 every year.
The line between generosity and cynicism is a thick one. If a child is hungry, feed the child. If a man asks you for money for a hungry child and the man’s keeping $300,000 for himself, don’t give it to him.
Give it to me.
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