You too can feed poor people from the comfort of your home if you know the answer to this question. See, you go to Freerice.com and for every correct answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to feed the poor. 10 grains. Let me remind you what that looks like:
At Freerice.com you just pick a category, answer the questions and for each response you get right, a poor person gets those grains on their plate tonight.
It seems this week I am on a fire against what I dubbed “Social Activism for the Facebook era” (or, campaigns that give people the feeling that they, too, are helping make the world better). I cannot really articulate how angry I am at the thought that someone’s fate is put in the hands of privileged people with “clicking capabilities”. I get it that everyone wants to help. I get it that everyone who plays does so out of good intentions and mostly impotence. Because, really, most people have neither the time nor the energy after working or studying all day to engage in real political action, so clicking on a bunch of trivia questions seems to be the best second choice. I guess what incenses me is the trivialization of poverty, the dehumanization implied in those ten meager grains of rice. The constant perpetuation of the myth that “the rich” (and if someone has the time and knowledge to answer those trivia questions on a computer that supports Flash, the person is, inarguably, at least, very privileged) should just devote a passing attention to “third world problems”, preferably in between clicking on “Like” in a Facebook post and sending out their next Twitter about dinner.
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