Disseminators of the Ten

We’re almost at the 10-year mark, and we will be kicking off the 2020 Yogis right with the first one going to Pamela Anderson, who was smarter than the average celebrity when she stormed out of a gala last April after €100,000 earmarked for poor French children went to fire-ravaged Notre Dame cathedral instead. The “Baywatch” star said she was at an Olympique Marseille fundraiser to support poverty-stricken children when organizers auctioned off a big ticket item to benefit the Gothic cathedral. “Surely the children suffering in Marseille could have used the 100,000 € more than the church that has already received over a billion in donations by billionaires,” the actress fumed on Twitter. “I hope they will reconsider and give where it is needed,” Anderson continued. “To the community here in Marseille where it was intended. And would go much further in making lives better.” I agree with her. The event was intended to raise money for a particular charity that addresses an ongoing need. Then they sold off a large item for a cause that raised over a billion in a single day. Even assuming they don’t have enough, it’ll probably take years before the funds run out. If you’re raising money for a particular charity, you need to raise the money for that single charity. That one item represented almost 20% of the money raised that night, and went to a cause that has hardly struggled to raise funds, and that won’t really suffer if those funds aren’t enough. Notre Dame will get rebuilt eventually, but hungry kids need food now. Exactly every cent (unfortunately for the organisers, that includes euro cents) has to be donated to the advertised cause(s), or it’s fraud. And quite frankly, I don’t give a shit about Notre Dame. It is a cathedral, it has history and art and all that bla bla bla, but guess what - even with all the rebuilding and reparations, the art and the architecture being restored are not the same as the ones that were made hundreds of years ago. They are replicas, not the originals. The originals were lost to the fire. Notre Dame is a thing of the past, and it is the inevitability of the past to wither away into nothingness. But children are the future. They are the ones who will inherit our world. Raise them right, and they may create something tomorrow worth a hundred dusty cathedrals.

Second Yogi for 2020 goes to @gutinepaul, who was smarter than the average Twitter user. He is the first person from the Marshall Islands to receive a Yogi, and he bloody well deserves it. His tweet last week about people associating Asians with coronavirus screams voice of reason. Stupidity is the real pandemic, along with the media over-sensationalism.