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Passive Guilt
December 6th, 2006 at 01:55
Walking through town today on the way to work, a number of chuggers tried to accost me. You do know what a chugger is, right? 2004 called, they want their wacky “look what new word has made it into the Oxford English dictionary!” news story back. A chugger is a “charity mugger”… one of those people who stop you in the street and try to get you to setup a direct debit to a charity.
Thankfully, I had the excellent excuse that “I was late for work” and had “no time” to stop. The trouble is that the chugger, who had no doubt been working all day (it was nearly 5pm) in the cold, dirty streets of Leicester smiled and said in a upbeat yet sincere way “Oh, that’s a shame! Have a nice evening!”.
He might have been smiling at the £9 an hour he was earning or whatever, but I still feel a bit guilty about effectively deciding not to save the children despite his friendly enthusiasm. And this got me thinking….
By electing to not save the children, am I giving my tacit support to hurt the children? Am I now effectively a cheerleader for kicking children in the face? As I’m not a Friend of the Earth, does that make me an Enemy of the Earth?
I’m worried that there’s not a Switzerland-like neutral reaction, as unlike Switzerland saying “You guys sort it out between yourself, whatever, we’re not getting involved (unless you have Nazi gold)”, I actively rejected the chance to help out some poor people. And I didn’t even check for any Nazi gold.
This passive guilt makes me wonder what other evils I might be doing to the world: because I haven’t adopted a dog, does that mean that another dog has been put-down because of me? Did the protests against the Iraq war fail because I didn’t make an effort to go down to London that day? Did loads of hard-working production staff at Celebrity Love Island lose their job because they didn’t get the viewing figures because I didn’t watch?
I’ve tried to change my ways, to avoid this. At the moment I’m watching BBC News 24 in order to keep Chris Eakin in a live news presenting job. Its no use though- I’ve got to go to bed soon, and I can’t imagine that anyone is keeping an eye on Quiz TV at this hour on a Tuesday night.
I’m a monster.
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