Don't Make It So Hard to Do the Right Thing

 Back in 2009, I think I was going to move to a smaller apartment and I had some furniture I wanted to get rid of.  Unlike a lot of people in apartments I didn't want to just go put it in the dumpster (or next to the dumpster) since most of it was in good shape.  But I only had a Pontiac Bonneville that couldn't haul the furniture to a donation site.  So I called the Salvation Army and a fairly rude woman scheduled an appointment at a really shitty time.  It was worse than the cable company because it was 8-4, or basically all day.  I'm supposed to take off a whole day of work to donate furniture?  And the kicker:  since I lived on the second floor I had to bring everything down to the ground or they wouldn't take it.

Whaaaaat?  So I have to take time off my job and carry a bunch of furniture by myself just to do the right thing and not just throw it in the dumpster.  Real nice.

I figured if I had to take time off work and carry the shit myself anyway, why not just go rent a van and put the shit in it and drive somewhere on a Saturday afternoon?  Right?  I think the van wound up costing me like $60 for a few hours to take it to a different thrift store, not those Salvation Army jerks.  I didn't bother calling them to cancel so when they showed up at the appointed time I wasn't there.  Probably not nice to take revenge on a charity, but they weren't exactly charitable.

It's kind of the same thing when I cleaned up my closet and found all my old cell phones going back to like 2008.  I was looking for how to recycle them and one place I looked up online wanted like $60 to buy a UPS box to ship them in.  WTF?  I could probably buy another cell phone for that and just toss these old ones in the fucking dumpster.  At Walmart there's a kiosk for selling old phones but you know these ones I have aren't worth anything because they aren't recent iPhones or Galaxies.  Where I used to work there was a donation box to give old phones to the troops; it'd be nice to find something like that where I can just drop the things in without dicking around with a kiosk or paying a bunch of money.  Or I can just toss them in the dumpster on the way to my car.

Since I got rid of local TV from Comcast, I've been using the Fox Local app on my Roku to watch the morning news.  (You can also use the Tubi app that also has other channels.)  One of the commercials is will.i.am reading a "poem" that's in no way a poem saying that black people are dying at a higher rate than others from colon cancer and need to get tested.  There's another ad from the American Cancer Society with a schmaltzy theme song and telling people to get tested for cancers.

Hey, that's great, buuuuut just nagging people to get tested is kinda disingenuous.  I mean, this isn't Star Trek TNG where you can just walk down to sickbay and have Dr. Crusher run a mini-flashlight thing over you and instantly tell you you've got cancer somewhere and then give you a hypospray to fix it.  "Getting tested" can be an expensive and time-consuming process.

Every morning I want to tell will.i.am that maybe the reason so many black people are dying isn't because they don't want to "stand up to cancer" but that to get tested, especially for colon cancer, can be pretty fucking difficult.  I mean I got the instructions for a colonoscopy six months ago.  You've got to get a prescription for something to give you super-diarrhea, you can't eat solids the day before, you have to show up at like 6am wherever they're doing the procedure, and you've got to have someone there the whole time to take you home.  Even if you have good insurance and a support system it can be difficult to do all the stuff they want you to do before, during, and after.  

Now imagine you're a single black woman in Detroit or Flint or Saginaw with a few young kids and a job working at a restaurant or retail and you have to do all of that stuff.  You probably don't have great insurance or a lot of money for out-of-pocket costs, it's probably hard to get a day or two off from your job, and it's probably hard to find someone to look after the kids.  So, yeah, maybe that's why black people are dying and not that they don't want to "stand up to cancer."

Instead of nagging people to "stand up to cancer" or "get tested," could will.i.am and the American Cancer Society actually do something to help the problem?  Like maybe provide money, transport, and child care so people can actually go get tested and stand up to cancer?  "Creating awareness" is nice, but oftentimes awareness isn't the problem.

The problem is so often we make it hard for people to do the right thing.  Besides what I've talked about, near the start of the pandemic there were these commercials in Michigan for recycling raccoons, which doesn't mean how to dispose of roadkill.  It was this group of raccoons in cute outfits telling people how to recycle.  But it really just emphasized the problem with trying to recycle:  it's too complicated!  I mean some plastic you can put in and some you can't and who's going to spend their time sorting  all this garbage?  And you have to clean all your garbage before you can recycle it.  Yeah, that's what a busy person wants to do after a long day:  clean the garbage.  These "Papertarian" commercials with Retta are kinda similar in kinda making me not want to recycle.  I mean you've got to cut up your boxes--all your boxes--and flatten them and blah blah blah.  Or you can just throw the shit in the trash can or dumpster and be done with it.  And we wonder why people don't recycle.

It's been the problem for a while with alternative fuel cars that they're too expensive, hard to recharge, don't get great mileage, don't go very fast, and don't hold much cargo.  Electric cars are getting better in terms of mileage, speed, and cargo room but they're still expensive and still can take a while to charge.  That makes it hard for a lot of people--like me--to switch even if we want to.

So, yeah, the problem is so often we make it too hard for people to do the right thing.  Then wonder why they don't and just grab some easy reason like people are lazy or no good.  Instead of making those ASSumptions, maybe we should find ways to make it easier for people to do the right thing.  Not things like whining on a blog no one reads.  I mean, this isn't even creating awareness, is it?