Here is my entry for the latest, and final, WarChild Challenge. Please read, watch, and vote over on the site.
Why I should win:
I subscribe to a belief in basic humanism, and that is what I bring to this project. No one decided who would be privileged and who would live short, meaningless lives of suffering. It just happened. We don’t deserve our charmed lives and they don’t deserve their misery. But as humans, the only beings capable of this amount of love and suffering that we know of in the universe, we can do something to help our fellow men and women.
We, the middle-class in the industrialized world, were all winners of a grand cosmic lottery before we even knew we were playing. The universe rolled the dice and almost everyone who’s reading this was born into decent families of decent means in a decent country.
And what did we do to deserve it? Nothing. At worst we try not to squander our winnings and at best we choose to share some of it with those less fortunate.
I admit, at 24 years old, I’ve done little to help the world around me, like almost everyone else. I lead a reasonably charmed life, like so many Canadians and, like so many Canadians, I regularly choose not to share this fortune with many people beyond my inner circle of friends. I give to charity every year, like everyone else, but that’s hardly something to start getting too boastful about.
Why should I win, with a resume this modest? Because this is a perspective I would like to bring to this project and to the whole idea of doing good: The perspective that people like me, regular people, actually can do something. That we should be doing something. That for all our prosperity and success we did little to earn it and less to deserve holding onto it. So why can’t we share our fortune with others, why shouldn’t we feel compelled, if not obligated, to help other people?
Few excuses remain when you begin to think about the world in these terms, and those that do feel insufficient.
And even fewer remain when we approach every situation, even the most dire, in stark, humanist terms. There is no one else out there that will help those in need but us. If there were, surely we would have seen that help by now. The only thing helping other human beings are other human beings.
We can support WarChild, we can support our local programs and projects, and we can do something.
Why Joel? Video
I wanted to demonstrate the perspective I would bring to a WarChild project by creating a video about being a lucky Canadian. I wrote a song called “Have Another Drink” that is, essentially, about squandering your winnings from the cosmic lottery.
It’s about how even the luckiest people in the world can manage to be sad and the only thing they know how to share is their misery.
This, alongside images of me growing up and my life today, shows how easy it is for a lucky Canadian to take for granted the privileged place we have in the world. And when you compare it to a place like Sierra Leone, it shows just how lucky we truly are.
And, ideally, it makes you want to consider sharing your luck a bit more.
Lyrics:
hey baby, we’re lucky
she says after swallowing her pills
god we’re lucky
she says when she’s reaching for her glass
so goddamn lucky
she says when she’s taking off her clothes
maybe tonight you’ll touch me sober
maybe tonight you’ll sleep right through the night
maybe tonight we’ll sleep a little closer
but tonight’s another test of what can last
she cries, i’m leaving
but he knows that’s just a game
she lies, i love you
but he knows everyday’s the same
she smiles, i hate you
and he knows she’s back again
maybe tonight we’ll see that we are nothing
maybe tonight you’ll try smiling with your eyes
maybe tonight we’ll see we are the lucky ones
but tonight’s another night of crying shame
we won our ticket
to happiness and pride
and no one’s asking us to pay
we stand above them
rich and fat and sad
having never learned to share
maybe tonight we’ll learn what love means
maybe tonight they’ll let us play their game
maybe tonight we’ll get to taste their sadness
and wonder why they all cry in their dream
