Anton’s note: originally written on June 28th, 2013.
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Something happened today; it made me felt quite annoyed.
A group of UI students, my peer, showed up with their yellow jacket, carrying out an act that I considered as “begging”. You can call it asking for alms or donations or whatever you want to call it, I will keep the usage of “begging” to imply their act. Back to the story. They were begging for money from another students for a Lombok earthquake victim relief effort; to put it in a simple way, they were redistributing wealth from the students to the victims. Sounds noble, a noble cause indeed.
But I was disgusted. I rarely used the word “disgusted”, and I’m not sure I can make you understand why I’m disgusted, but I will try anyway. No, I’m not disgusted on people asking donations, I even appreciate these UI students’ cause.
Here’s the thing that disgusted me. I offered them (within knowledge and permission of my co-workers in the co-op) old edition textbooks, still in 100% condition, well preserved in their plastic wrappings. They were unknown stock of the old generation student co-op and we decided not to include them in our stock for accounting reasons. I knew those books can be sold; about some days before, I gave ten books to an event committee member and she said they got sold at an old book store for a total of 100 thousand rupiah. That was easy money and even the old bookstore asked for more. Back to the story, I offered these group of UI students 2 boxes of textbooks (about 50 books in each box, which translates to a probability to gain a million in total) and I allowed them to choose which books they wanted or whether they wanted multiple titles of books in each box.
They plainly and simply refused. They said they only accept cash.
They definitely “worked hard” for their cause.
My juniors who was seeking funds for their event received those textbooks from me a week later and they got sold out in less than a week.
I was disgusted…and still disgusted whenever I remember about that event…
Anton World 