“A low income father trying to pay for his travel
expenses and his daughter’s funeral.”
“This loving father passed away after a 7 month battle
with leukemia.”
“These young kids deserve to see their mother laid to
rest”
“He woke up not being able to feel his legs. Ultimately he needed surgery to remove a
large tumor from his spine.”
“Black ice caused a multi car pile up and this loving mother
and great wife is a tragic victim now in for a long recovery.”
If you look at your social media feed, I’m certain that you
will see many posts for a deserving family struck by tragedy or a wonderful
parent taken far too soon from loved ones.
I see these on my Facebook feed all of the time, and these
stories are very sad. Their friends
share their story, hoping the power of social media will spread the word and
raise some money to provide
When I see these, some thoughts run through my mind:
§
While a sad story, is this person “deserving”?
§
How do I even pick someone “deserving”
out of all of these?
§
What about the person/family’s personal
responsibility? Granted, some things you
can’t predict, but there are things you can protect against.
§
And I certainly don’t have enough
money to donate to everyone.
Sites like GoFundMe make it easy to raise money for
deserving people and causes, it raises questions for me.
I looked at that site and put in my zip code for the
fundraisers closest to me. Out of the
first 10 listed:
- 3 are for funeral / memorial expenses
- 4 are because someone was injured or disabled
- 1 is because someone’s house burned down.
- And 2 are for other things completely.
The quotes at the start of this post are from some of these
10 fundraisers.
Many people donated to these fundraisers generously, raising
thousands of dollars. But given the cost
of funerals, and the cost of living, my guess is that the money would only
cover a small funeral or provide a month or so of living expenses.
Why didn’t these families have life insurance? Where’s the disability insurance?
If you read these stories and why they need the money, the
reasons are exactly why someone should have life or disability insurance!
I will donate when it’s someone I know. And I’m certainly empathetic to these
situations. But is it just me? Am I expecting too much of people to take
care of these things themselves?
What do you think?
Where’s the line between kindness of strangers versus personal
responsibility?
