The never ending tale - give me your money!
This year, as in others, the United Way is out raising money, they want about a million dollars and Mr Patchett is going to get it for them. One of the annual events is "Put your neighbour in Jail" basically (in the name of good fun) you ring the UW and a volunteer cop will come and arrest the person you want put in jail. All in good fun, as of 2pm Friday 65 people had been arrested and 58 jailed, the others fearing publicity paid their way out of the picture. This event was being played out in front of Vic Hall. The 'detainees' were all herded into a fake box of bars and then paraded into the Old Bailey to be sentenced by the Judge. Renee Roberge was playing the part and raised a whack of money for the UW.
The rascaliest miscreant of all was Mr Patchett.
Dressed in a fake jail suit he was out playing the shill. as well as being arrested and then being sentenced. I walked in just as he was defending himself on a charge of, "Fooling about Town!". He also managed to get himself charged with contempt for his bufoonery in front of the judge ( I guess his poker buddy didn't like what BP was saying) and seemed very happy to peel off a few hundreds for the privilege.
Just another small part of Cobourg Culture.
PS for a video of the event click here (this link is a clean one!)
The rascaliest miscreant of all was Mr Patchett.
Dressed in a fake jail suit he was out playing the shill. as well as being arrested and then being sentenced. I walked in just as he was defending himself on a charge of, "Fooling about Town!". He also managed to get himself charged with contempt for his bufoonery in front of the judge ( I guess his poker buddy didn't like what BP was saying) and seemed very happy to peel off a few hundreds for the privilege.Just another small part of Cobourg Culture.
PS for a video of the event click here (this link is a clean one!)
7 comments:
The darker side of this, if I can call it that, is the Keystone aspect of the Kops getting involved in this kind of thing. I find it somehow off-putting. Maybe even more money would be raised if everybody just sort of tasered each other and rolled around on King Street while costumed volunteers gathered up the cash falling out of their pockets. I suppose my cynicism has something to do with Barbara Ehrereich's 'Bright-Sided' about how relentless glee has turned America into a nation of happy slaves. As Ms. Ehrenreich says "Positive thinking is neither." Bill Patchett, a positive thinker if ever there was one, would be about the last person I'd want to get stuck next to on a long-haul flight. But, Ben, you hit the nail on the head with what I hope was a purely facetious title for all this local anaesthetic: Cobourg culture.
DJC
To raise the most money possible, they should have a dual-stream possibility.
It would work like this:
such-and-such is in UW Jail,
pay $1 towards bail money to get him out, or,
pay $5 to offset other's bail money and try to keep him in.
When it comes to someone like Bill Patchett, option 2 would raise bags of money.
Two more convictions by United Way
can be seen by clicking HERE
What they won't tell you about this charity game is that they are raising funds to provide the social services that used to be the responsibility of government. Remember how that worked? We paid our taxes and government funded the services that all of us need.
Now we still pay taxes but government has shucked off all those so called soft services, and the affluent play silly games like this to raise money so they don't have to feel guilty about their excesses.
For the rest of us, it means dropping a few items in the food bank bin at the grocery store and we too are off the hook.
We could help more by ganging up on our politicians and demanding they fund social services properly, which in the end would be much better for everybody.
Ehrenreich's target is actually not optimism or positive thinking. It is "the ideology of positive thinking." She doesn't object to us being upbeat, just to us being told to be upbeat when we are not actually feeling that way or do not have a reason to feel that way
GEE! I hadn't thought of it quite like that!
I support the United Way. The Labour movement has always supported the United Way.
When United Way fundraising is successful, it is good.
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