|
When one has to spend money in order to raise money, it just doesn’t add up
 I was feeling tired and listless, so I scanned the pages of Reader’s Digest. I chanced upon a story of Mr Joachim Franz.
He had cycled 130km and walked 50km a day in a race from Cape Town to Johannesburg in South Africa. He stayed in the race even when his Achilles’ tendon became inflamed and was in danger of tearing. His excuse for this mad endeavour was to raise funds to fight HIV/Aids. For his extraordinary dedication, Reader’s Digest named him European of the Year last year.
Today, his job description reads “health emissary”. To quote Reader’s Digest: “Joachim Franz has clout, whether he’s looking for help for the girls in Nepal rescued from forced prostitution, or for an audience with the Pope, or for a washing machine and an electrical hook-up for Sister Abigail who looks after 20 orphans in South Africa.”
In 2008, Mr Franz collected 400,000 euros (S$712,000) by performing physical feats. The money goes to assistance programmes throughout the world.
But why must Mr Franz torture himself physically in order to raise funds for charity? Can’t the organisations and individuals who donate money to him, donate directly to the causes or organisations he champions? If the causes deserve support, why should he torture himself to prove that they do? How do the causes benefit from Mr Franz running or cycling long distances?
Ironically, to make his physical feats possible, Mr Franz has to incur the cost of a supporting network. A United Nations programme on HIV/Aids has endorsed his charity activities, and more than a dozen sponsors lend him financial support. It is generous of them to do so, but all this money would have been better spent if it had gone directly to the causes Mr Franz supports. Why spend money unnecessarily
in order to raise money?
But what Mr Franz does, and the way the public and media respond to his effort, is not unusual. Many others have used the same method to publicise their causes and thereby raise funds for them.
That people need to do this goes entirely against common sense. But perhaps they are not appealing to logic or common sense. Perhaps they are making a naked appeal to our sympathies.
That would explain why people with physical handicaps performing difficult stunts make a bigger impact at such charity drives than others. When they try a common sensical approach to raising funds – like simply asking people to donate money – it doesn’t always work. Whereas, when they make dramatic public gestures – like propelling a wheelchair across hundreds of kilometres – they raise considerable sums of money, though they may have to incur financial costs in the course of performing their stunts.
Irritated by the absurdity of it all, I discarded the Reader’s Digest and picked up that day’s Straits Times. But splashed across the front page of the newspaper that day was a story recounting the chaos caused by an Icelandic volcano spewing ash into the atmosphere. Now that the airline flights that had been cancelled earlier following the volcanic eruption were resuming, there was evidently debate in Europe as to whether officials had overreacted by grounding the airlines.
The resulting inconvenience and financial loss received more media attention than the 2,000 people who died just a week earlier following a 6.9-magnitude earthquake in a remote Tibetan region of Qinghai province, in north-western China.
Why does it seem sometimes as though we have lost all sense of what is important in life? Perhaps I was feeling irritable that day because I had got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning – only I sleep on the floor, not a bed. Whatever it is, I think we should, like the boy in the story, dare to say to the media: “The emperor has no clothes!”
The media knows how to play the psychological game and make us turn our attention to whatever it wishes. What concerns the media is not really freedom of expression; what concerns it is the freedom to dramatise whatever issue it desires.
Indeed, in the United States, the media has its own self-serving code of conduct: for example, to toe the line that Singapore is a ruthless authoritarian state. Any journalist or columnist who dares to deviate from that point of view is shunned.
For example, I know of an American columnist who was dropped by his newspaper after he wrote an article
about Singapore that put us in a favourable light. So much for the US standing up for freedom of expression.
Those of us who are of sound mind should never just be passive receivers of information. We should think and judge for ourselves, not follow blindly in whatever direction the media shepherds us. Not to do so, as is often the case, would lead us to adopt a distorted view of the world.
A world in which owning a Montblanc Timewalker GMT Automatic or a Prada handbag is worthy of our aspirations. A world in which helping the less fortunate – really helping them versus helping them so as to make oneself appear a hero – is something we might condescend to do after we have satisfied all our consumerist desires.
Wake up before life has passed us by and, in our last moments, it suddenly dawns on us that we have lived in vain.
The writer is director of the National Neuroscience Institute. Send your comments to suntimes@sph.com.sg
|