Save The Children

 

We've all seen those ads on TV urging us to call right now to pledge just pennies-a-day to save abandoned animals, wounded warriors, children with cancer, abused women, and a seemingly endless array of others, each more deserving of our charity than the last.  The one that strikes me as most inappropriate is the ad (you almost certainly have seen it) showing emaciated African or South American children living in squalor and badly needing a meal or even just a simple glass of milk.  You can save this child with a donation of only nineteen cents a day.  How can anyone be so cruel as to withhold such a pittance?

As I watched one of these ads, I had to wonder why, with all the foreign aid money we splash across the globe, none of it seems to get to these starving youngsters.  Where is all that foreign aid money going?

It helps to understand, first, that we don't do 'foreign aid' today the way we used to do it, say, a hundred years ago.

A hunded years ago, Mrs. Jenkins' 5th grade class would adopt Armenian refugees or Chinese orphans or the victims of the war in West Wheresoever.  At the beginning of the term, all the children would receive a small cardboard coin bank.  During the year, they would put spare change into the box until the day finally arrived to pool all the contents.  On that day, usually with great fanfare and ceremony, the children would pop the box-ends and pour the contents into a fishbowl or pickle jar, sometimes as part of a field trip to the local bank.  The coins would be counted and sorted, perhaps by the semi-magical machine the bank used that collected the coins sorted and ready to be slipped into coin sleeves.  The bank manager would then announce that the class had collected $37.89 and the coins would be converted to a check payable to, most likely, The American Red Cross.  There would be a representative from the intended charity ready to accept the check and to give a short speech congratulating the children for their generosity toward those less fortunate.

The $252,319.23 collected from several thousand schoolrooms across the country would then be used to buy wheat, rice, potatoes, milk, tea, flour, salt, goats, and water pumps for villages where such things were not simply nice-to-have, but vital for survival.  The people who got those things knew that American schoolchildren and American charities had made it possible for them to see another Spring.  Everybody loved us and thought we were, as Alexis deTocqueville once suggested, the most uniformly generous people on Earth.

Foreign aid today is an entirely different story.

Today, the government taxes everyone to support the General Fund that covers all the government functions we have come to expect and including foreign aid.  Foreign governments (not the people) get vouchers good for purchases from American companies.  Foreign governments don't want wheat and rice; they just have to redistribute stuff like that and it's a big pain in the butt to do that.  They'd rather have the money.  But if we just give them money, there's no guarantee they won't spend it in places we disapprove of, so we give them vouchers that can only be redeemed on purchases from American companies.  The American companies can turn the vouchers in to the Treasury Department for real cash.  That way, the money stays here where it belongs.

Alas, the companies that usually redeem those vouchers are generally in the business of supplying guns, tanks, warships, and warplanes, and the ammunition all those things use.  Very little, if any, of that 'foreign aid' actually gets to the people who need milk, tea, coffee, scrambled eggs, toast, cereal, or a new water pump for the village.

Most of it, in fact, goes toward bombing, maiming, and killing the people who need food and water and clothing for themselves and their families.

And everybody hates us.

And that's why your nineteen cents a day is so badly needed.