Losing hope in the human condition

I like to describe myself as a bitter and cynical person, and even though there's usually a light-hearted spin on it, I reckon I'm usually safe in using that description.  But every now and then I drop the cynicism and put a little faith in humanity, and every single time I see the true ugliness in ourselves as a species.

Today (for non-UK readers) is Comic Relief. It's something that comes around once every year or two, and as a nation we try to raise money for charitable projects at home and abroad. Now some good friends of mine are trying to raise some money for this event, and they aren't doing as well as they'd hoped. The donations close at 17:00, so with just over 2 hours to go they've raised a little over 10% of their target (just to clarify, yes I've already donated).

 

So I decided to do the best thing I could, and reach out through the wonderful medium of social networking sites.  And what was the response?  Near enough sweet FA.  5 times throughout the day I posted the link to my almost 200 followers on Twitter.  Did anyone donate?  Possibly one or two (the donations can be anonymous, so it's impossible to tell).  Now I don't like being guilt tripped into making donations, I understand that people don't always have the spare money at the right time, but it costs nothing to retweet.  If I have 200 followers, and one of them has 200 different followers, then the click of a button is all it takes to double the chances of donations coming through.  So how many retweets did any of those 5 posts get?  Not a single one.  As a species we care so little about helping eachother that clicking a button on a website is not worth the effort.

And of course Facebook was much a similar story.  On this occasion I did manage to get 2 shares from friends, for which I was very grateful.  But aside from that I saw my posts being ignored while people instead shared links to funny vidoes and competitions.  I think I found that more infuriating, the idea that people are willing to make more of an effort to share a stupid Youtube vid then they are to help out a charity.

 

Well congratulations, humanity. I popped my head out from bitterness and cynicism for just one day, and you've shown me why I shouldn't have bothered in the first place.



Edit: With half an hour to go I finally managed to get a retweet from none other than Brian Blessed!  By the time clock ticked down to zero the grand total of donations had doubled.  Thank you, Mr Blessed, for making the day's efforts seem worthwhile after all.