Kasey's Page of Mindless Rants

November has always been one of my favorite months. It starts out with Election Day (by the way, the Voucher Referendum was soundly defeated), continues through Veteran's Day and ends up at Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is, in turn, one of my favorite holidays of the year. It means that family will be getting together, that there will food, parades, football, and best of all, it means that the Christmas Season is officially starting. It is a time for being thankful, enjoying life, having fun, and just plain being happy.

And it is a time when all kinds of people are going to make me feel guilty about it.

As retailers start to advertise Christmas, various charities and organizations will start to advertise guilt. You know what I'm talking about. This is the time of the year when hordes of commercials appear, particularly on the radio, that emphasize how we shouldn't be enjoying the holidays because poverty still exists in the World.

Now, please don't get me wrong. I think that it is VERY important to give to charity and to help those in need. My wife and I give to charity, we donate to the food bank, and we always give quarters to the Salvation Army Santa Clauses. My problem is not with any organization looking to do good deeds, but with some of the methods that are used. I have issues with commercials that say "You're enjoying Thanksgiving? How dare you? Don't you know there are children starving in China?" - or - "I see that you actually have PRESENTS underneath your Christmas Tree. What kind of monster are you?" - or - "Are you singing Christmas Carols? Well, the only songs that the impoverished people who live on the Plains of Tajikistan will be singing this year are the woeful dirges of misery!" - or - "Any fool who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled in his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!"

Wait, that last one was somebody else. But I digress.

I just don't think I should feel guilty for enjoying myself, especially when I REALLY AM trying to do my part to help people out! I don't think you deserve to feel guilty during the holidays unless you have actually done something worthy of it, like executing a stuffed dummy named Bob or cooking up Big Bird for your Thanksgiving Turkey (though if you do that second one, you'll probably have a lot people begging you to go one step further and make Barney your Christmas Ham). The advertisers for many charities, however, want you to feel guilty about simply being happy. One of my personal favorites is the Jiffy Lube commercial that comes on the air about this time each year. They start off by saying something about how "We here at Jiffy Lube would like to share a holiday meal with everybody out there". Then they present you a three course meal of morbid statistics. "Our Appetizer today is this -- in 2006, there were over 17 million homeless children in Utah. The Main Course may not be very appealing -- Utah has a higher rate of poverty than all other 49 states put together, plus Puerto Rico, Bolivia, Vietnam, and most of Madagascar. Finally, the Dessert will be hard to swallow -- if one single Utahn had donated just one cent more last year, we would have been able to completely end World Hunger, eliminate AIDS, cure Cancer, fix Social Security, pay off the National Debt, and buy everyone in the country a pet llama." They actually describe their 'meals' using phrases like "Hard to Swallow", "Tough to Chew" and "This'll give ya indigestion", all while playing background music that is more depressing that Mozart's Requiem.

Again, I think charity is good; I just don't like the advertising. I don't dislike WHAT they're trying to accomplish; I dislike HOW they're trying to do it. And I honestly think people as a whole are good natured, especially at this time of the year, and I think that people will give even without morbid commercials. I DO like the radio stations that get donations by forcing their DJ's to sit out in the cold on top of a bus until they collect enough food to feed everybody in Sri Lanka. THAT'S funny. (Hee hee, the DJ's are outside. How can they do their radio show if they're outside?)

So this year I'll give to charity, and on Thanksgiving morning I'm going to get up, watch a 400 foot long Garfield balloon float through New York City, watch some football, and then eat enough turkey and stuffing to knock me out for a week.

But I will be sure to pluck out all the yellow feathers first.