Yes, the road to hell is paved, but that doesn't mean it's accessible

Good intentions are tricky. With philanthropy, you can get so invested in your own self-righteous helpfulness that you fail to see you aren't respecting the objects of your charity and their needs. On a personal level that could be called narcissism. On a broader level, it is the annual MDA* Telethon in the United States, hosted by comedian Jerry Lewis.

The telethon has historically relied on pity to sell the need for a cure and Lewis is the unabashed champion of portraying disabled people as pathetic victims and unemployable "half-persons" for the cause. He's also completely unapologetic about demeaning disabled people to raise cash. Never mind that pity never helped any disadvantaged group of people gain their own place in the world. Never mind that he's raised billions for that still-elusive cure while disabled folks languish in institutions and remain largely unemployed because of societal barriers maintained by attitudes like his.

Actor Michael J. Fox, who lives with Parkinson's disease and raises funds for research on it, once said "I feared pity because pity is a step away from abuse." Fox has also stated that his life goes on without a cure, and he's been his own spokesperson, forthrightly showing his impairments while engaging the public thoughtfully and open-mindedly on the related politics of stem-cell research. He's been anything but a pitiable victim, even though he is fighting the clock.

Fox knows pity is harmful, and he's not wrong about it's relationship to abuse. For one thing, a life that is considered hopeless without a cure is held rather cheap. But more to the point on good intentions, when told repeatedly over the years by many former MDA poster children that the telethon experience is demeaning and damaging, Lewis shifts directly from pity to verbal abuse. Over and over again.

Don't believe it? Here's one vague apology the MDA issued to try to shield itself from the damage it's spokesperson causes**, even as they keep him on the job. The offensive remark the apology doesn't really mention is when Lewis said: "Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!"

Jerry Lewis has good intentions, you say. The money is for a good cause so it doesn't matter what message brings in the dough. Not every disabled person agrees -- we're a very diverse lot -- but I say the price of pity is far too high. Jerry Lewis has good intentions? I know where he can go with them.

Image descriptions:

The banner at the top of this post is for this Blog Against the Telethon event. It reads, "Until There's a Cure... There's a Telethon: Blog Against the Telethon -- Abolish Charity and Cure Mentality". The text is bold over a black-and-white photographic background of a little blonde girl's face close-up at right and Lewis in a tuxedo pointing a finger toward her downstage at left.

The second image is a color photograph of a person in a manual wheelchair wearing a black t-shirt with bold pink lettering that reads "Piss on Pity" while holding a sign that reads "Dump Jerry". It's taken in 2003 by Tim Wheat of MCIL.

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* Muscular Dystrophy Association

** Other damage? In 2000, Jerry Lewis said this at a comedy festival: "A woman doing comedy doesn't offend me, but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world." The Chicago Sun-Times report says that he apologized later to avoid a backlash in fewer telethon donations. Here's the humorous response from several female comedians.