Exploiting Charity

It's Sunday evening and ABC is running hour after hour of generated generosity. First we have Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and then it's Oprah's Big Give. I admire the spirit that we have here. After all, EM:HE is miles better than the gratuitous self-indulgence that we have in the original Extreme Makeover, where people would abandon their families for weeks on end in order to get injected, nipped, and tucked.
I have two hesitations when it comes to these shows. First, there are thousands of families with problems in this world. Why do these programs feel it appropriate to shower buckets-full of blessings on one family or individual while all of those thousands of others are left with nothing. Oprah, it seems to me, is far worse about this than EM:HE. I've seen Oprah dump all manner of good things on people who have simply dug themselves into stupid circumstances. Don't get me wrong. A mistake should not be held against somebody for all time. Just because you incurred $50,000 in student loans in order to attend clown college should not condemn you to poverty for this life and the next, but does that person need more than to have their loans paid off?
I know, I know. I might be falling into that old excuse for doing nothing: "Since I can't help everybody, I'm not going to help anybody." That's not it at all. Think about the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan encountered the crime victim. He attended to the man's wounds, took him to an inn, and paid the bill. That's great, but did he also build the guy a house and put his kids through college? No. If Zeebo the indebted clown has his loans paid off and gets a new car and gets a bunch of new appliances and receives a $12,000 Panera gift card, I think that's a bit absurd, especially when some other clown has outstanding student loans.
But let's face it. Giving a modest gift to a bunch of people rather than an enormous gift to a single person just doesn't make good television. It's much more dramatic for an individual to receive a whole kitchen full of Kenmore appliances than for everybody on the block to get a new microwave.
My second problem with these shows is with motivation. Sears and various other vendors give "generously." I quotate "generously," because they're truly not generous at all. What does a house full of Kenmore's best appliances cost? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it's a lot less than a single thirty-second ad during a prime-time TV show.
Whatever happened to giving because it's the right thing to do? Do we have to have giving that winds up putting our name on something? Giving that can be charged to the advertising budget?
Hey, it's their money. They can do whatever they like with it. And a generous person can dump huge amounts on a single individual or a smaller amount on hundreds. That's their call. In no case do I consider myself worthy of that sort of largesse, so I'm grateful in my own way. I'll still watch those programs now and again, but I'll always have the feeling that there's something not quite right about them.