Bob Geldof awakes, sweating into satin sheets. Amongst his fever dreams he has a sudden epiphany. “I can help raise money for the Ebola crisis! It’s so simple!” Bob beams to his inward self.
“You could just give them your own money, Bob” says a voice buried beneath his teabag-laden eyes. He sits in his bed, as droplets of once somnambulant sweat wander between the salt and pepper forest upon his chest.
BG ponders this idea for a moment, before another epiphany slams into his brain box with a more atuned charity clarity
“F*ck that, I’ll get the plebs to foot the bill, I’ve done it before and I can do it again”.
Sir Bobmas of Geldofia leaps spryly from his bed and wrenches open his laptop like King Kong opened the head of that T-Rex.
Furiously, he mashes the keys with his pendulous digits and the words ‘I don’t like Ebola (Tell me why)’ appear on the screen, with a thin black line blinking after them.
He shakes his head and laughs.
“Why not rewrite a decent song I did to fit this? I’ve done an Africa song before”.
So, he moves the cursor to Open file and finds the folder marked <‘Band Aid’>
</’Band Aid 20′> </CTRL+A > </CTRL+C> </New document > </CTRL+V>.
“Replace a few lines “
</saves as ‘Band Aid 30’>.
Meanwhile, £34 billion is spent by our government every year on weapons of mass destruction. We, again, foot the bill for problems created and/or exacerbated by our leaders. They get those who have benefited from the system (celebrities) to ask us to spend our money mopping up a situation they could have sorted out in February, by working together with groups like Medicine Sans Frontiers and healing the African people.
Instead, our leaders and press exploit this to drive home their flawed, untrue immigration policies and hysteria. F*ck Band Aid. We should be united in common brotherhood with our fellow humans, not buy the same shit song we’ve bought every Christmas for 30 years, because we’ve been made to feel guilty. Donate directly to those who are already there, helping. Don’t massage a bunch of X-Factor winners egos, so they can sleep at night on their beds of cash because they sang a song for the ickle dying afwicans.
We (in the west) created the need for charities. We exploited the third world, as where there is growth, there must be deficit somewhere. We use it as a release valve for our crass consumerism. A couple of nights a year we allow ourselves to care – a cynical reversal of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate; the Two Minutes Care.
While those charities invest in dodgy companies, sit on admin fees and parade people with lots of money looking sad onto the gogglebox, whilst the structures that have created these inequalities continue to benefit them. This can be seen when celebrities like Gryff Rhys Jones & Myleene Klaas claim the ‘mansion tax’ a humanitarian crisis (ignoring the bedroom tax); whilst Gary Barlow & Jimmy Carr avoid Tax as much as possible to keep the money the system they’re avoiding gave them for being okay at comedy/music, with minimal criminal proceedings.
