Dirty Little Secret

I live in a place where people range from comfortable to wow-is-that-a-Murano-glass-chandelier-in-your-toddler’s-bedroom?-rich. And because of all the perks of living in such a place – the safety, the amazing public schools, the proximity to cultural events, the fact that no one wears house slippers to the grocery store – I try to ignore all the things that bother me about living in such abundance (I didn’t say I always succeeded. I just said I’d try.)

But I can’t ignore this one.

There are a few places that I tend to visit nearly every day. Because my life is exciting like that. Anyway, two of my local places have put out jars to collect change for the people in Haiti. Both places are reputable and reliable and will donate the money without a doubt. If they had any money to donate.

In one place, the jar is empty. In another, where it has been up for a week, it is nearly so.

I would like to think that all of my neighbors have driven their Porsche Cayennes and Ranger Rovers to their banks so that they can wire thousands of dollars to Haiti. I would like to think that they are all too busy using their credit cards to carry change to put in the jars. I would like to think that they just haven’t noticed the jars.

But the jars are rather obvious. In one case, there was even an email about the jar. And who doesn’t keep change in their car?

Every day, when I drop in all the change I can scrounge up, I keep hoping that the jars will be full. Maybe I’m obsessed with them because I can’t write a huge check or volunteer for Doctors Without Borders. Maybe they just seem so important to me because helping to fill them is all I can do. Maybe this is why I’ll never own a Range Rover – I can’t save money worth a damn.

Would this bother you? Does the idea of the empty change jars in what is literally one of the wealthiest counties in the country bother you? Or am I just being bitchy again?

As I believe I have mentioned before, we are pretty much the poorest people living in Stuck-Up. We have to do things like decide which bill to pay and drive around in a car with a busted mirror because we just don’t make very much money. That’s not the norm here in Stuck-Up, where every family seems to have at least one pristine Lexus and dropping a couple of thousand dollars on a toddler birthday party is no big deal. But hey, that’s great for them. Maybe if you all start buying things through my Amazon stores and clicking the ads on my on other blog we’ll be able to buy a new car too.

Er, anyway. This is actually not a plea for for you to check out my other sites. It’s a bitch session about Stuck-Up.

Does your grocery store have those little paper tags by the cash register that you can rip off to show that you want to donate $1, $3 or $5 to your local food bank? You can just rip them off and add them to your pile of groceries right then, no having to mail envelopes or write checks. Easy, right?

Apparently, I am the only person at the Stuck-Up grocery store who pulls off the tags, EVER. Every time I rip one off (and it’s only the $1 one because, er, we’re generally teetering on the edge of broke-ness) the cashier looks at me like I’m a weirdo. And I’ll tell you something else – the thickness of the stack of tags doesn’t ever change. I am slowly peeling them off one at a time. The $5 and $3 stacks are STILL full.

Now, I know that a lot of my townsfolk go to fundraising dinner-dances and write checks to whatever charity is in this year. Some of them do a lot more than that, too. But how come no one can donate a dollar to the food bank while shopping at the grocery store? These same people brought in boxes of food to my daughter’s preschool. . .where they wound up at the same food bank.

Can someone please explain this to me?