Sacks for Sandy

One of my favorite ways to entertain myself is to let trivial inconveniences affect me like there's an unavoidable catastrophe about to befall the world. Usually, it's something like the Internet going out for an hour or drinking so much during the day that I have trouble keeping my luscious prick hard on orgy night. Like I said, trivial stuff.

 

Anyhow, I love things like that because my staged fury is such an awesomely hilarious spectacle that it really should be witnessed first hand. If I so much as stub my toe, it can launch me into a 25-minute tirade about how the Salvadoran death squads of the 1980s weren't necessarily right, but they weren't completely wrong, either. Come to think of it, it's not unlike this here blog that you read religiously each and every day. Just considerably louder. And with my annoying voice in the mix. Seriously, be thankful that I'm not a podcaster.

 

But there are people out there who really have had a seriously bad time of it lately, and they don't use it for comedic effect.

 

I\ve been reading Michele Catalano off and on for years now. She writes her ass off, so I suggest that you read her, too. She's pretty fearless at the keyboard and you don't see enough of that.

 

Michele lives on Long Island, New York. When Hurricane Sandy hit the eastern seaboard on October 29, her home was without power for something like three weeks. It was a harrying time, but she and her family were safe and I'm not aware of any major property damage on her end.

 

Michele was lucky. A lot of people in New York and New Jersey weren't.

 

Instead of counting her blessings and resuming everyday life as much as possible, Michele and Leah Reich decided to do something for the people least able to cope with the aftermath of Sandy: children.

 

Imagine that you're a little kid, leading a predictable, suburban life and suddenly, everything's gone. Your home, all your possessions, everything that you think makes you you when you're that age is destroyed. Everything around you is destroyed, too. Your neighbors are all in the situation that you are, too.

 

Imagine that you're under ten and you're faced with death for the first time. Violence rips out of the skies and ends lives around you, while also taking everything that's familiar to you. Do you ever feel safe again? How do you cope? Does anyone out in the world even care what you're going through?

 

Michele and Leah, being awesome people, do care about those children. And they want them to know that Mother Nature isn't going to take their Christmas away from them. Not on their watch.

 

They set up Sacks for Sandy, pretty much all on their own. Their goal is really simple. They want to deliver 1,000 presents to kids who lost everything to Sandy, and they want to have it done by December 22. And Michele and Leah have made it easy for you to help. The Sacks for Sandy website has an Amazon Wishlist that you can buy something from, or you can just donate cash through an attached PayPal account.

 

I thank each and every one of you for coming here every day, and there are lots more of you than there used to be. For the newer readers, I'd like to explain for a second how I like this place to work.

 

If you look around, you'll notice that I don't have a donation button or a "tip jar." I don't have an Amazon Wishlist. The fact that so many of you busy folks give me your attention is more than enough for me. I don't want your money and couldn't bring myself to ask for it if I needed it.

 

But very occasionally, I'll ask you to get behind a nonpolitical cause that most rational humans can get behind. It's always something I see that grabs in me in a way that I can't let go of. The only thing that I ask of you in return for my hours of work, news analysis and exquisitely crafted dick jokes is to do something nice for a stranger every once in a while. More often than not, it's causes for kids that I direct you to.

 

This one is kind of special to me because I've admired Michele at a distance for a decade now. She has no idea who I am, but I dig her writing in a big, bad way and I respect that she's putting aside the upheaval in her own life from the storm to give a bunch of kids that lost everything a Christmas. As you know, I don't step up for just anyone in the blogosphere, so you should know that she's good people.

 

She's been taking pictures of the deliveries for her Tumblr page as they come in the mail, and Sacks for Sandy is suceeding even more than I think she expected. In less than a week, they've doubled their target number of gifts from 500 to 1,000.

 

I wouldn't be able to thank you good people enough if you chipped in. Actually, I want my readers to literally overwhelm Michelle and those kids with your kindness and love. According to Blogger, there are about 1,900 of you every day. At any given time, a couple of dozen of you are reading one post or another.

 

If just a third of you chip in a little bit, that's over six hundred gifts or donations, easily breaking Sacks for Sandy's goal. Imagine if this little community alone put Sacks for Sandy in a position where they could raise their target to 1,500 or even 2,000? How cool would it be if we did that? If just a tenth of you give, that's still 190 people doing something deeply neat for a kid that may have lost everyhing.

 

Look, I get that this is a terrible economy and everybody's feeling a little pain these days. I'm personally cash-poor right now, which is why I'm writing this up. If you can't give to Sacks for Sandy, bring the cause to the attention of people that can.

 

If you're someone I know personally, consider your contribution to Sacks for Sandy your gift to me this year. You'll be getting off easy, being that I'm such a pain in the ass to shop for.

 

If you want to reprint this post on your blog, feel free. The same goes for tweeting it or favoriting it on Facebook. Better still, write your own. After all, I'm not a particularly good writer. You could probably be more effective at this than I am. Start a fundraiser at your office for them. If you own a successful business, offer to match the contributions of your employees. Tell your friends and family.

 

You can do a whole lot without spending a dime, if you don't have it. There's always someone you know that does. Your helping out with a gift or a donation is fantastic, but if you can get two or three other people to do the same, that's heroic.

 

The point is that all of you can do something to help out Sacks for Sandy. The fact that you're here in the first place means that you're somewhat tech-savvy. I imagine that most of you have Twitter and Facebook accounts and I know for a fact that a lot of you have blogs of your own.

 

I understand how charity exhaustion works, which is why I don't do this very often. But when I do, you should know that it's important to me. I'm fairly lucky in that I draw a fairly diverse crowd. Some of you come here to get a slightly different slant on politics. Others come for the stupid celebrity stuff. Others still for the naughty bits that I post from time to time. Some of you just hate me personally. We could all get together and have a truly epic bar fight one night!

 

Because you all come here for different reasons, you all have different circles of influence. And when it comes to something like Sacks for Sandy, you can do something magnificent. You can let a little kid know that the world really isn't ending.

 

There's really only one thing I can tell you. It'll be the most important Christmas gift you give this year. I can guarantee you that.

 

I promise that you'll be getting insight and dick jokes from me for years to come. But there comes a time when I want something in return. And this is that time.