Stick your soapbox up your arse.
Please don't take this personally, as this isn't directed at you so much as at everyone who has ever made a post, speech, talk or comment making us all out to be such terrible people because, sometimes, just occasionally, we don't all sit around and spend all day working for charity to save the starving dying cancer-ridden orphans. So what if we have never felt 'real hunger'? So what if someone wants to spend their money on 'worthless tat'? It's their money, and who are you to look down on anyone for not giving their money to the 'poor starving orphans'? We are disconnected from those orphans so much that invoking them as a reason why we are 'bad' for being materialistic has become a cliche, and unless you are a fedora-wearing aid worker taking time out of his busy non-stop schedule of delivering gruel to Africa, you are being a hypocrite.

Yes I spend more time thinking about myself and my life than I do about the starving orphans. No I don't feel guilty when I leave good food at the side of the plate, even though there are starving people in the world. Does that make me a bad person? I don't give a toss. I'm just sick of the whining, hand-wringing soapboxed bollocks that gets spouted about how we should feel guilty for owning things when OMG THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO SURVIVE ON EIGHT PENCE A DAY. I don't care. I don't have to. I've got water on tap, I've got a bed, and a fridge full of delicious tasty food. I win at life, and have absolutely no emotional connection to the starving millions. You are not going to guilt me into giving up what I have, either to give to them or simply to feel what you probably think is verstehen for those people. You might as well follow me around reading out the cricket scores - it's not emotionally jarring, it's irritating and of absolutely no interest.

And breathe.
( Shegetz Chris Kamara's comedy moustache, Mon 18 Aug 2008, 10:12, Reply)