It was
a day like most other week-days, filled with the
routine of work and other
banalities of my
existence. I'd just driven home for lunch and, as
my meal slowly rotated in the
microwave, I sipped from a glass of
2% low-fat milk from a jug I'd bought, on sale, at a nearby
Sprint Mart. After a short time, I got bored and started aimlessly flipping through the five or six
local channels I'm able to pull from the
ether until I get around to
ordering cable.
As is to be expected,
the selection was quite poor, consisting mostly of
soap operas and
talk/
court-room shows where
celebrities ramble about their
boring lives or people complain about their
cheating spouses and
thieving neighbors. Finally, having been unable to find anything of
greater interest, I settled on a
talk show featuring a
country music singer who had overcome
drug and alcohol abuse and moved on to live a "
more fulfilling life."
Suddenly, as I sat and
brooded over my own
personal troubles, I realized that the station's
programming had switched to
commercials and that I was watching a group of
sickly little
African children drinking from what looked like a
stagnant mud puddle. Their bloated
stomachs jutted out in contrast to their
stick-like limbs as they drank from cupped hands. The narrator, meanwhile, was talking about their
plight and how, lacking proper
plumbing facilities in their
village, they were being forced to drink water
tainted with just about every variety of parasite imaginable, as well as
fecal matter.
On to the next
advertisement, sponsored by a different
organization, which featured what seemed like a
legion of childern in some
Latin American country. They were all walking around knee deep in a
garbage dump where, no doubt, their
parents had sent them to fetch
leftovers that someone like me had considered
unworthy of his or her
delicate palate.
So there I sat
watching these
pathetic little creatures drinking
liquid shit and wading through piles of
disgusting rubbish. Children brought into
this shitty world by no fault of their own, who would never
realize their
full potential because they had been denied such simple things as
food and
education, being sent out instead to
scavenge for their own
livelihood. They would probably become
pregnant by the age of fifteen and
send their own children out for the latest
entré from the "
Café de Crap."
All of a sudden, the
skyscraper of problems I though I had was reduced to an
insignificant grain of sand. I thought about the image, shown minutes before, of the African children
dancing and
cheering around a little
water pump installed over a well drilled thanks to funds donated to the organization. I
pondered the fact that these
kids could be so affected by something so simple as a
water faucet and, at that moment, I decided to
make a donation... it later
felt kind of good, knowing that I'd just helped make the
world a little
less shitty for
someone.