As we approach a season of giving beware! Charity has become an industry. Among the bad actors is Sarah Palin’s daughter, who paid herself a salary in excess of 200,000 while spending about 10 percent of that on her charitable cause. This woman didn’t have to earn an MBA to learn how to create her own job! Such entrepreneurs slice and dice environmentalism and public health and social maladies, wasting resources and overtaxing your goodwill.

Your charitable impulses are praiseworthy, but please look further. Most of the problems charities address are the social and environmental damages left behind as corporate persons persue profits. Consider how we can hold corporate persons responsible instead of trying to clean up after them.

I suggest that you find one or more charities that advance your concerns and become sustaining members. Ignore all other appeals no matter how valid or heart-wrenching to avoid donor fatigue. Give as much as you can but don’t stop there. Consider how the socioeconomic system that creates these problems can be changed as well as the governmental system that fails to collectivise the costs of remediation.

John Gibson

Blooming Prairie