Butterflies
DOnate YOur Glasses
Like the Sword of Omens, give someone sight beyond your sight.
Some websites are so desperate for content they’ll take an idea that could have been a tweet – like donating our glasses – and bump it up to an article, padding it out with irrelevant introductions barely connected to the business of, for example, donating our glasses. They’ll follow that with a series of contradictory, flip-flopping paragraphs that start with “We’d never” and “Okay, never is too strong” and “Then again…”
Not for us, that wasteful tomfoolery. If I know anything for sure – and I don’t – it’s that the internet thrives on concision, on cool-headed people knowing when to say when. And so down to business:
As a wearer of glasses you’ve undoubtedly had a difficult life. Your eyes packed up early. You got called “Four Eyes” and “Window Face” all through school. You had your people represented by Mr Magoo, a shameful example of glasses-minstrelry that greatly exaggerated how often you’ve addressed post boxes as “Madam.” You’ve had your culture co-opted by hipsters, influencers and Halloweeners. You’ve seen glasses used to make beautiful women ugly in teen rom-coms. And you’ve been prejudicially misjudged, your intelligence vastly overestimated when you are, in fact, quite stupid.
No one can blame you for turning against society. No one can blame you for hating this world that’s always hated you, for descending into the sewers and getting a taste for opera. But it’s time to let go of the hate. To seize the moral high ground and give something back. It’s time to donate your glasses.
We fucking got there!
Vision Aid Overseas has been working for years to bring decent eyecare to people in developing countries, where something as basic and treatable as short-sightedness can lead to genuine inequality, genuine disability. They reckon 1.2 billion people struggle to see properly because they can’t afford glasses. That can knacker the lives of would-be school pupils, would-be teachers, would-be anythings, making the jaunty tone of the above paragraphs seem so inappropriate I’d delete them if I knew how to work the backspace key.
Here in the decadent parts of the world we can donate our old glasses for reuse in the parts of the world we’re forever shitting on. We can drop them off at our local opticians who’ll send them on to whichever charity they’ve partnered with. In the UK the Lions Club International – the Pepsi to the Rotary Club’s Coke – are collecting them, and are so posh they refer to them as “spectacles.” In the US you can give them directly to the Lions or to VSP’s Eyes Of Hope project. And while you’re at it you can donate some actual cash to Vision Aid because we’ve already solved the problem of lousy eyesight and it’s horrific that it can still ruin lives.
This is a pretty easy choice. We can chuck our old glasses in the bin or give sight to one of the billion people who could use them. If ever there was a no-brainer, this is it. This and Eric Trump. He’s got nothing up top at all.
And if you’re interested in donating things, or in copywriters bumping up word counts and SEO rankings with outro paragraphs stuffed with links, you should check out how to give money to charity, give books to people who haven’t got any, or give blood to people with less blood than you.
And with that this article’s finally going to end, with a couple of overused but on-trend phrases to low-key suggest youth and social media savviness – and we are here for it!
(591 billable words.)
Donate your glasses
Help someone to see
Change their life
Photo credit: Erin Reid
Environmentalism
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