Taking a quick break from scrambling to wrap up final projects/presentations this week, to bring you this Public Service Announcement.
There’s a meme going around on Facebook, urging people to change their profile images to those of childhood cartoon characters. That alone is fun and harmless, but then somehow it got “taken over” to be about taking a stand against child slavery.
The intent’s nice and all, but…what good will it do? It’s not tied to any charity or activism group. Children in these horrible situations will not actually be positively affected by this meme. There is no direct positive outcome that comes out of people changing their profile images, besides just “warm fuzzies” that may, in some isolated cases, spur people to seek out related charities/groups and donate to them. But I can bet you that 95% of the people who change their profile images will do nothing else. (I’m not leveling accusations or blame at anybody–life’s busy and we all want to show our support somehow, right?)
But let me put it another (blunter) way. The children caught up in the slave trade and other really terrible institutions like it probably don’t even have access to a computer, much less Facebook, to even see these images. This campaign isn’t hurting anything, but since it isn’t helping anything, is that really good enough?
So let me urge you all kindly to do this instead: instead of spending 15 minutes looking up a decent image to use as your new Facebook profile photo, spend that 15 minutes to instead look up a charity or activism group that fights child slavery–or any other cause that’s important to you–and donate whatever amount of money you can afford. That will make a much more definite and immediate impact. It doesn’t have to be huge–every little bit helps.
Okay, getting off my soapbox now. 😉
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(Is there such a thing as “the bazooka of Megatron”? I keep getting these spam comments mentioning it, and at first I couldn’t help but think, “That’s nice, but I think you’ve got the wrong website/fandom…?” haha.)
And don’t forget about the RPG module giveaway!
Also, thanks to RavnDream for letting me know that the comics section “broke” during my recent host migration. I’ll try to fix it in the next couple of weeks!
And wow, hello to all the new visitors yesterday! I am not at all sure how or why my site traffic quadrupled on the 3rd of December, but thank you for visiting–hope you enjoy what you see. 🙂