despotic philanthropy

i saw my first Salvation Army bell ringer of the year yesterday, standing outside of one of the big box drugstores that inevitably sit directly across the street from one of those other big box drugstores. his arm flailed wildly, and i thought to myself: already?

my ire with these non-professional noise polluters stretches back to childhood, when my grandparents would take my cousin, brother and i to do our annual Christmas shopping in Kingsport, Tennessee. it was nothing more than an aging industrial town with a third rate mall, but to us it was like shopping on Fifth Avenue. our small town back in North Carolina didn't have toy stores or book stores or record stores or anything so grand as the Hallowed Consumption Kingsport Mall, and when we got old enough our grandparents would let us go off on our own. hijinks ensued.

the hijinks are beside the point.

the point is that my recollection of Kingsport is inseparable from those clanging bells. the sounds tormented me, coming and going, back and forth, fort and da.

(have you read your Freud lately?)

over the years of trips to Kingsport, i gradually developed a fantasy, a way to finally silence those bells, and to this date it is stands as one of the only times i have ever considered the acquisition of money a virtue. my plan was this:

first, obtain a vast fortune. next, approach a bell-ringer on his first day of work and offer $50,000 to the Salvation Army if he would refrain from the racket. the bell-ringer would have to maintain his post and could not explain why he was failing to fulfill his dharma. (the same rules would apply to female bell-ringers, only with the pronouns replaced.) at the end of the holiday season, i would write the check and drop it in the bucket.

seeing as how i've yet to amass a sufficient fortune, the plan has thus far remained purely hypothetical. it has given me time, however, to streamline and improve the plan. for example, my initial formulation would require me to loiter in front of malls and drugstores and goddess knows how many other miserable sites of consumption. doing so would likely drive me to the brink of suicide, but i now realize that i could just hire someone else to do the stalking.

likewise, my plan would require some research. i have no idea how much loose change gets dropped into those buckets, and my promise of money would have to be substantially greater to make it worth the shame to the Salvation Army. to address this shortcoming, i imagine i would need to embark upon some sort of burglary-by-proxy, not unlike that perpetrated by our 37th president:

a man after my own heart?

best of all, i've even come up with a name for this method of charity, despotic philanthropy, and i believe it could become the latest trend in the world of nonprofits. only time will tell...