What is your favorite charity, and why?

A2A McKayla.

McKayla, I squirm under this question. You and Jeremy are the two people that, when you started following me, I thought “… I should be a better person”.

I’m not a better person in the past three months. But I did think I should be, for a moment.

I’ve given a monthly tithe to two charities, because they both accosted me at the train station, because I’d finally started earning an actual salary, and because I knew the causes and knew them to be just. And because secular, apathetic, and big-government though I am, I reflected that, now that I had money, a tithe was a reasonable thing for me to give back.

One charity got overly aggressive with cold calling me to increase my tithe, so they’re out. Come to think of, I now remember there was an added reason why that charity got my initial tithe: the accosters were two young blonde Swedish twins, completing each others’ sentences.

No I am not making this up.

No I am not above that kind of thing. Neither, it would seem, was the charity.

Shame, because it is a charity close to my libertarian heart. Amnesty International.

The other charity has had me hooked for well over a decade. Doctors Without Borders. To heal the sick and the wounded where humanity is at its lowest ebb. That is a truly noble thing. That is Tikkun olam.

(What’s that? “Repairing the world” is only the liberal Jewish interpretation of the phrase, and the Orthodox interpretation is “eliminating idolatry”? That’s… *shrug*.)