Enough Already!

I hope you can bear with me while I rant a bit about junk mail. We all get gobs of it that we have to send to the landfill, but the most irritating of all - at least to me - are the mailers from charities. I do donate to certain ones and respond sometimes to requests from friends asking for help to honor a loved one, but how to know which ones use the money for the stated purpose instead of swallowing it as "administrative expenses"? Worse than that, shortly after sending in a donation, the mailbox becomes stuffed with mailers from all sorts of obscure groups that I've never heard of. Even if I were rich as Rockefeller I couldn't support them all, and maybe they're worthy, maybe not. What the sudden flood tells me is - the charity that got my donation put the information about me on a mailing list which was sold to as many other groups as possible. If the charity sells lists, it also buys them, which means my money isn't really helping anybody. I'm fed up. From now on, I'm following the adage "charity begins at home" and will concentrate on groups I can thoroughly investigate. No solicitations will be answered without written promises not to sell my information. Yuska