{"id":331,"date":"2002-05-01T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2002-05-01T19:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lee.org\/blog\/?p=331"},"modified":"2008-05-25T10:29:03","modified_gmt":"2008-05-25T18:29:03","slug":"on-philanthropy-and-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/2002\/05\/01\/on-philanthropy-and-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"On Philanthropy and Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[This was written in 2001 or so. I haven&#8217;t updated it but present it here for posterity. &#8211; Lee 9-20-05]<\/p>\n<h2>Politics<\/h2>\n<p>I am a soft Libertarian. I could talk for a while about this but I&#8217;ve got more important things to do than argue over the internet.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d rather yell at you in person.<\/p>\n<p>See what being a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lp.org\">Libertarian <\/a>is about.<\/p>\n<p>Hey, want to know what our congress is doing (or not ;-) right now? See the actual text of bills and find out what bills are coming up for legislation. Go talk to <a href=\"http:\/\/thomas.loc.gov\">Thomas<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/lee.org\/politics\/bill.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"76\" height=\"104\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Here are some important documents:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/lee.org\/politics\/declar.html\">The Declaration of Independence<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/lee.org\/politics\/const.html\">The Constitution<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/lee.org\/politics\/bill-lyrics.html\">I&#8217;m Just a Bill<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Lee on Philanthropy<\/h2>\n<p>A while ago, I ran the web site at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coolidge.org\">Coolidge Corner Theater<\/a> in Brookline Mass and until September 2001 I ran their mailing list. I haven&#8217;t been to the theater in several years now&#8230; I&#8217;ve been living near NYC and don&#8217;t get up to Boston that much.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/lee.org\/blog\/images\/cinemapage-coolidge.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"241\" align=\"right\" \/> Several years ago, Julie and I decided to do volunteer work. We couldn&#8217;t think of what organization we wanted to volunteer our time to. We thought about Habitat for Humanity, soup kitchens, helping the homeless, and the like but it just didn&#8217;t get us excited. We thought about it a while and knew that we had to pick a charity that we felt good about. It&#8217;s easy to pick something that&#8217;s hard to do. If you are doing something that you&#8217;re not really good at, it&#8217;s easy to feel like you&#8217;re &#8220;working hard&#8221; at it. When actually, you&#8217;re just a thorn in the side of your charity. The goal here is to -do- something, not just feel all warm and gushy inside.<\/p>\n<p>We also thought a long time about the kind of charity we wanted to donate our time to. We had to feel good about what we were accomplishing. If we helped build a house in Kentucky, then some guy or family a thousand miles away will have a roof over his head. Of course, that&#8217;s a good thing, but it doesn&#8217;t do much for my world. Saving starving children in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, or China is nice but getting a couple pictures and a story from the Save the Children Fund is still a bit distant.<\/p>\n<p>We wanted something:<br \/>\n&#8211; hands-on &#8211; signing a check is too quick<br \/>\n&#8211; present &#8211; helping people thousands of miles away just isn&#8217;t satisfying<br \/>\n&#8211; that used current skills. My charity doesn&#8217;t want to have to teach me how to use a bandsaw<br \/>\n&#8211; that we could appreciate &#8211; after helping, I want to be able to stand back and admire it a little<\/p>\n<p>It was a difficult choice, putting that last one on the list. It sounds too vain. But we figured out for ourselves that it&#8217;s ok for a component of philanthropy to be vanity.<\/p>\n<p>So Julie and I began helping the Coolidge. I helped to run their web site and fully administered their schedule mailing list. Those were things that I was good at and they needed. It felt pretty good. I&#8217;m glad I did it. It feels good knowing that I helped The Coolidge stay around.<\/p>\n<p>We picked the Coolidge I volunteered my services there because:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Indie film takes risks. Big Cinema often caters to the least common denominator. That usually makes it boring. It&#8217;s really quite frightening how people are attracted to such dreck. At least when Indie film is bad, it&#8217;s REALLY bad, and you still have something to talk about.<\/li>\n<li>The Coolidge is an authentic 1920&#8217;s Deco Style theater. It&#8217;s just plain cool inside. There&#8217;s all these details and cool features that make me feel like this place was really made for the theater-going experience<\/li>\n<li>They have pretty good popcorn.<\/li>\n<li>The occasional live performance and event at the theater is always cool. They have folks like:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Annie Sprinkle, Sexpert<\/li>\n<li>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alloyorchestra.com\/\">Alloy Orchestra<\/a> performing for silent films. Seeing them perform for their print of Metropolis in &#8217;94 was an AMAZING experience. I heard a piece about them on NPR recently (4-20-02). They&#8217;re famous!<\/li>\n<li>Each year, there&#8217;s the 24hr Science Fiction Marathon<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s good to volunteer for a good cause. I know I&#8217;m not saving the whales or educating underprivileged youth but I&#8217;m doing something that I can believe in. I&#8217;m helping to keep alive a cultural icon that I think is very important.<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[This was written in 2001 or so. I haven&#8217;t updated it but present it here for posterity. &#8211; Lee 9-20-05] Politics I am a soft Libertarian. I could talk for a while about this but I&#8217;ve got more important things to do than argue over the internet. I&#8217;d rather yell at you in person. See [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}