CURMUDGEON UPDATE FROM THE S.B.¹
In MY day, when we needed to raise money for something, we went to our neighbors and our parents' friends and people at our church, and badgered them into buying cookies or useless tchotchkes that no one would ever use. Or we held a car wash, or we had a spaghetti dinner down at the Junior High, or something, you know, normal.
It never would have occurred to us to write to celebrities or politicians (except maybe the mayor of Mt. Healthy² since he was surely someone's neighbor) to ask them to give us money so that we could go do something fun in New York or Paris with our musical group, scout troop, or club. When did this insane practice start? Who decided it would be a good idea, and what on earth made them think it would work? Do group leaders learn this tactic in Group Leader school? Do all the children in a given organization then blindly follow the directive of said leader, without telling their parents or any other authority figure who might talk some sense into them? Or are entire towns taken over by some strange mental health epidemic wherein they think Famous People just have no idea what to DO with all the buckets of cash they have sitting around in their living rooms³ and are itching to give some of it (it's so untidy!) to some random teenager, if only they knew of a random teenager to give it to, but unfortunately there are no teenagers in Famous People Land? Or what?
This has been today's Curmudgeon Update from the s.b.
¹See the Acronyms file on your left
²A refuge from the great cholera epidemic of 1850.
³Famous people often have more than one.
