c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Americans tend to give like we consume: spontaneously, extravagantly, even capriciously. An image flashes on the television screen and we respond. A celebrity passionately supports a cause and we join in. A letter arrives with a heart-wrenching photo and we send money. When it comes to giving to victims of tsunamis, tornadoes and other visible disasters, we can be amazingly generous.

So how is it that Americans are sometimes accused of being miserly when it comes to charity? Over the last few weeks, even as we were giving with record-setting abandon, we have heard an undercurrent about our stinginess.

In many ways, we give selfishly.

For the average American, the tsunami represented an ideal giving opportunity. Almost immediate images of breathtaking beauty juxtaposed with unimaginable loss and pain, all during the holiday season. We saw “people like us” at the scene of their idyllic vacation, interrupted by tragedy. We heard and read of an industrious and exotic population devastated by an act of nature instead of war, disease or civil unrest.

The tsunami footage was riveting, the personal stories compelling, and our giving was almost Pavlovian in its predictability.

But contrast that outpouring with the fact that many organizations usually raising funds for AIDS, child survival or poverty received more in a few weeks for the tsunami relief than they had in the entire previous year for all those causes combined. Does that fact represent generosity or does it demonstrate how much we hold back from the less “compelling” causes?

Ask the head of any humanitarian organization if he or she expects this to be a good year in terms of giving to the ongoing needs of the world and you will find an almost unanimous negative response. Most fear that Americans will have sated their appetite for giving and will now close up their wallets, leaving the rest of the suffering in the world to experience a devastating drop in support.

Compared to the tsunami, there are relatively few compelling images of the thousands dying daily of AIDS. Poverty is more of a constant drip than a dramatic wave. Thousands of babies gasp their last breaths each day without a camera to record the horror. And refugees in Sudan are almost used to cameras recording their plight, yet relief barely trickles in.

It’s easy to say that we would give if we really knew what the needs were, but it’s hard to make a case for our ignorance. The Internet gives us access to almost every corner of the globe and the news organizations do a reasonable job of covering international humanitarian crises. Sudan was a regular feature on the nightly news before being displaced by the tsunami, but still Americans gave little. It just didn’t move us.

We give when we want to, when we feel those in need deserve our benevolence. But we must learn to give even when there isn’t any dramatic footage, star-studded benefit or special mailing. We must give not as consumers, but as those who have been given much and have the capacity to respond with discipline, integrity and selflessness.

An additional tragedy of this tsunami will be if our generosity comes at a cost to those already suffering in other parts of the world. The hope is that we give more than we knew we had, and we learn to do it again and again, not out of emotion but out of commitment.

MO/PH RNS END

(Dale Hanson Bourke is a consultant to humanitarian organizations and the author of the book “The Skeptics Guide to Dealing With the AIDS Pandemic.”)