My brother sent me a link yesterday to a cute little video. In it, an animated squirrel loudly laments an allegedly lamentable fact: Change jars for dogs collect more change than similar jars for kids in retail settings.

The squirrel, or more accurately it’s creator is outraged by this. Really, really outraged. The inference is society’s blatant preference for homeless dogs over homeless children. It’s wrong, but who could blame us if it wasn’t?

My dog love’s me unconditionally. He loves Lynn unconditionally. He feels the same about Cynthia. If I go out to shovel the drive, he is thrilled when I come back inside. Lynn goes to the store and he misses her and fusses ’til she gets back. Then he loses his little puppy mind.

If I tell him to clean up the mess from his treats, he doesn’t pout at me for hours. Nor does call me an a**hole when my humor is a bit dodgy.

Dogs don’t sell crack, liquor, junk food or weapons to live off other dogs suffering. Dogs don’t practice genocide or slavery. As far as I know, no dog has ever leveled a forest.  So yeah, dogs are a lot more sympathetic than humans.    But that’s not the reason they get more change than kids.  Nope, we’re not that thoughtful,  it’s all about implausible deniability.

The truth is both simpler and more complex.  We don’t want to think of ourselves as members of a society where children will go hungry without our charity.  None of us wants to acknowledge our role in that society.  We want to pretend that we would never leave a child in that situation.  Child poverty, child hunger, child labor, homeless children, these things are inhuman.  That’s the key.  We humans couldn’t possibly allow this type of horror.

We can’t reconcile our internal worldview with the truth of the external world so we ignore it.  If it doesn’t exist, it can’t be a problem.  So we look at the jars on the counter and the voices in our heads tell us needy children aren’t a real issue.  If they were, we’d be doing everything possible to fix it.  Since we are good people and we aren’t actively fixing it, it mustn’t exist.  Needy dogs we can handle.  Giving them our change seems like an appropriate response to needy dogs.

So there you have it.  It’s not that we actually prefer dogs to children.  The fact is we prefer our sanity over reality.  We want to keep our little delusions.  We want to keep believing that we are good people.  We can’t believe that if we know there are children going to bed hungry every night, and going t o school scared every day.  If we were good people we’d do more than drop some change in a jar for them.  Because we want to keep believing in our own goodness, we drop some change in the jar for the needy dogs.  It’s the right thing to do after all.

That’s why our caring (and our change) is going to the dogs.

Cheers, Winston