There’s something going around on Twitter called Giving Tuesday, which sounds like an attempt to prick people’s consciences after the push to spend money on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Whatever! We should give generously to the causes we support.
If you’re so inclined to donate, here’s a post from last summer in which I described how I donated money to Planned Parenthood AND IN THE SAME PHONE CALL got my name off their irritating call list! You can do it! They haven’t bugged me since then, so I may pick up the phone again to give them more money to show support for their work in the wake now of yet another mass shooting targeting a women’s clinic:
So today I called Planned Parenthood at 1-800-798-7092, and said that I’d like to make a donation on the condition that they never telephone me again. Send me all of the U.S.P.S. mail you like! Just. Don’t. Telephone. The nice young man on the other end of the line promised to delete my contact number, took my $500 donation, and promised personally to delete my the cell phone number I left with him in case there were a problem with my credit card.
Of course, Liz Covart can still use a few clams, so that’s another way to demonstrate your spirit of feminist generosity, too.
Historiann 
“Giving Tuesday” has been around for several years now, and I get appeals from a number of places with which I’ve had academic and other relationships, all or most of which I’d like to contribute to. It does prick your conscience. It can’t, of course, overcome the inevitable sense that you can’t support everything that you’d like to, or, what would probably be the best resolution, help you to set up a rotation of causes. There should be an app for that, inasmuch as we need an app for pretty much everything. It is a necessary irony of fundraising that you pretty much have to keep trying to tap sources that have ever given you anything in the first place, and the U.S.P.S. proviso is probably a good place to start.
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