Don Martin's "Charity Is a Four-Letter Word"

When you are young, you believe that charity is a red bucket and ringing bell and styrofoam containers and grateful eyes and a song by a 90s adult contemporary singer-songwriter telling you about sad puppies.

You believe that change is currency that you drop off and someone much older and wiser than you will convert it into homes for the homeless and it must all be true because those puppies on TV look so happy now that they’re living with that pop star.

Then you trip and crack your phone screen and can’t tell time properly because suddenly the same adults that gave you coins to put in the jar at the grocery store cash register with the baby’s faces on it are telling you that charity is putting babies in cages because they were delivered through the wrong womb.

Charity is somehow also defined as the lack of action—I show you charity because I did not fire you when the body you hold at night looks too much like your own—I show you charity when I do not put you on the street and sell your things, because the body I see before me does not match the body I saw before.

Charity is no longer change in buckets nor change in hearts, but a reminder, a thrumming mantra, repeating itself like a retail store’s background music that at first was pleasant but quickly becomes a sinister suburban torture:

You are so lucky.

You are so lucky I am in charge. It would be so much worse for you under someone else. You are so lucky I am on top of you; it would be so much worse for you under someone else. You are so lucky you are not hanging from a tree or heading down train tracks to a final burial behind a fence or on the other end of somebody else’s fists because at least my fists love you.

When you are older, you learn that coins in buckets and styrofoam containers of hot food and pop singers with sad puppies are the charitable equivalent of carbon offsets for your conscience, where you give a little money to make your company look better after dumping oil across the Gulf of Mexico—dump as much as you want and then pay someone to plant some trees and all is right as acid rain.

So instead of change we load bullets into thoughts and prayers and give the kids bulletproof backpacks and say we did all we could.

Burn down the Amazon, because fire is a tool of change and we are sad puppies waiting for a pop star and Charity is a four-letter word.