I said recently I’ve never seen such generosity. That’s true. I haven’t. But in the space of less than a week, it’s changed a little. I’ve only really seen it twice. The death of Princess Di was the first. Where the world seemed to respond as one thing, one entity. In the case of the dead princess, the world, as one entity, exhausted itself in grief.

And again, in the past two weeks. A new kind of grief. Much bigger in a way. And then this surge of charity.

A tsunami is a natural phenomenon in that the earth shifts and falls and creates an enormous and, yes, disastrous swell. It’s tricky to say any of this because it might make me look like a prick. At first I was overwhelmed and touched in a beautiful way.

In a way Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 became chic. His documentary, against all odds, became fashionable even, as unlikely as it might be, among the elite, the glitz crowd. It has become something of the same thing with the tsunami disaster. It has become the cause. I can’t quite figure out why.

Ok. Listen. It’s horrible. It’s unimaginably horrible. But the surge of charity has become something a little weird and off, no? The surge of charity must be, too, some sort of human phenomenon. But what drives it? The timing? It happened the day after Christmas. A time of generosity and of some leisure and some consumerism. Is the world buying back some of its soul? But there must be more than the timing. The media coverage? We’ve never, the world has never, seen disaster so loud, so colorful, and so ongoing. The tsunami hit in waves, one, and then another, over the space of a few hours. But in the comfort of my home, as new video is released, and as old video plays ad nauseum, it looks like from here the media tsunami continues to come, continues to savage and ruin and wreck.

Meanwhile the charity has become a sort of auction in reverse. Countries pledge money and then raise it and then raise it and then raise it some more, outbidding each other. Celebrities get behind it – the cause – and outbid each other for their own soul. Some organizations have stopped collecting money. They say they have enough. These countries have had problems before, big problems that nobody paid much attention to. A civil war, famine, monsoons, poverty. Now they have become the cause celeb. I have seen reports, many reports that put, no, that pit countries against each other based on their contributions. I have seen reports that line countries up based on per capita charity. Canada has been good, but compared to Australia or Japan, we have bought back only a small piece of our collective souls. And even charity has become politicized.

There have been disasters before, even of as much magnitude, though, yes, not often. Without the same, or even nearly the same, response. Some organizations worry that people will stop being generous. As with the world’s grief after the death of Di, when we had little left for Mother Theresa who was dispatched shortly thereafter. If something else bad happens in the next couple of weeks, the next few months even, I expect there will be little charity left. It has been spent, it’s being spent.

I am not advocating withholding charity. We can’t apportion charity out in little pieces; it too is a natural phenomenon. But it’s not purely charity anymore. It’s many things not quite as measurable or predictable as tectonic shifting. As charity, or whatever this thing is now, continues to swell, the dead will still be dead. And money, on its own, is nothing. We can’t buy our way out of guilt or grief.

I don’t mean any offense. I really don’t.

SS