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Tuesday, December 27, 2011

A Tragic Act of Kindness

Meet Kaley Mitchell. Kaley is a remarkable 9-year-old. For her birthday she received money. When she went to the store to buy things, she made an amazing choice. Instead of buying stuff for herself, she decided to buy toys for needy children. Quite a story, truly. Touches your heart.

In the version I saw, the talking head said, "The most amazing part of the story is that Kaley's mom received gifts the year before from the same organization that Kaley donated to this year, and Kaley didn't know it." Yes, that's quite a coincidence. To me, the most amazing part of the story was Kaley. "I thought it would be sad to get up Christmas morning and not have any gifts," she said empathetically. Then, looking completely confused, "I don't understand why Santa doesn't bring them gifts."

What a twist! Santa is a failure, so Kaley needs to step in and fix it. Either these kids were bad kids and aren't receiving gifts because they don't deserve them (and Kaley is circumventing that), or Santa is just incompetent (and Kaley is fixing that). I'm wondering, then, where it goes from there. I mean, Santa can only mess things up once a year. What about God? From Kaley's perspective (and, quite obviously, the perspective of a lot of cynics), there is a "right thing" and the powers that be (God or Santa) will not be able to do "the right thing", so we have to. This is the glorious truth that Kaley (et. al.) is learning from this wonderful story of Satan Claus. Oh, look ... I spelled that wrong, didn't I?

I think it's wonderful that a little girl thought enough of others to give her own gift opportunity to them. I think it's amazing that parents teach their kids lies like that on purpose. I think it's sad that an act of kindness can be subverted like that because of a lie like that. But, I suppose I should expect it.

1 comment:

David said...

Silly Stan, thinking things through to their logical conclusion.