Saturday 13 June 2009

Make a realistic wish

Sometimes people need to be reminded that for the cost of a trip to Disneyland or meeting a celebrity or sport-star (say $10,000) instead you could sponsor 20 underprivileged children for a year (eg: Plan @ $43/month), or maybe help an indigenous community in northern Australia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS36ZuCW-7c

2 comments:

Greg said...

I don't see what the fuss is about anyway - this joke has already been done. It was done on a show called "The Mansion" on Foxtel last year, although the Mansions skit wasn't as dark as the Chaser one.

Hamish said...

Good letter in The Age last week:


SHAUN Carney's piece regarding the infamous Chaser sketch (Comment, 10/6) was insightful and welcome. As a member of the "me, me, me, generation", I want to offer an apology. And some kind of defence.

The world we have grown up in is so unfair and so unjust as to make empathy with the worst off a kind of science fiction. How can the average Me3 Gen — in the third most liveable city on earth — imagine life as an AIDs orphan in Swaziland, for example? This is the context of the "me, me, me, generation": nihilism inspired by the totality of injustice.

I can't imagine the pain of losing a child to cancer, or being a child with cancer. But I really can't imagine being the parent of a child who is dying of malnutrition or the flu. It's not a question of whether a child is or isn't deserving of empathy and charity. It is our "complicity" in the deaths of thousands of children, from curable, preventable illnesses in relative discomfort and squalor, that makes the privileges of an Australian child, dying of a previously incurable illness in relative comfort and amenity, seem … funny.

Emily Sims, Yarraville