Doctors' Orders is a weekly satirical column in which two unprofessional, definitely-fake doctors offer up prescriptions for their Phoenix patients.
In the past few months, there have been two historic GoFundMe campaigns launched by Elon University’s best and brightest. There was junior Taylor Zisholtz and freshman Lucy Smith-Williams, who while training to be actual live disney princesses themselves, sent Acorn employee Kathryn Thompson to Disney, landed on “The Ellen Show” (how DeGeneres of them) and brought our entire community closer together.
Following that legendary Phoenix feat is “Crack Shack’s Sticky Situation,” the GoFundMe page for an off-campus house whose occupants got hit with a gnarly $360 trash fine. Once again, our heroic community of scholars united under a common goal and paid that fine. We did it, folks. We used and abused the system.
That “system” is Kickstarter’s less-attractive cousin, like the off-brand of your favorite cereal that you get from your off-brand grocery store — like shopping for food at Wal-Mart. Because for every undiscovered, underfunded Einstein, there’s a hundred trailer-park Teslas who only read the words “attractive” and “cousin” in the first sentence of this paragraph and assumed they knew where that was going.
For every good Samaritan, Acorn-Disney miracle, you’ve got your Crack Shack. For every decent nonprofit looking for a leg up, you have the no-good moochers spamming their relatives’ Facebooks for study abroad funds.
We’re not saying GoFundMe is entirely without purpose. We’re just saying it’s got its fair share of trolls. It’s the modern version of those guilt-ridden “for just pennies a day” commercials that want you to donate your change to a good, philanthropic cause instead of just the CoinStar. (While we’re on the subject, yes, the local Wal-Mart’s CoinStar is still out of order, and no, it’s not because we tried to get it to accept our Elon Honor Code coins. But if anyone wants to start a GoFundMe to fix that CoinStar machine, be our guests. That’s the kind of change we need, so we can get rid of the change we don’t.)
And don’t even get us started on the kids just asking for their peers to chip in toward their tuition. We all signed our souls away to the same devil — we’re not going to help you pay off your loans when we could be paying off our own. “Aw, geez,” you say, “Frankie and Lauryl sure are going to the proverbial well of student loan debt a lot these days,” and to that we’d like to point out that behind mortgages, student loan debt is now the second biggest source of personal debt in the United States.
“What’s that faint rumbling in the distance?” That’s just the imminent economic collapse stemming from a generation shackled to a smooth-talked Ponzi scheme. It’s going to be a fun couple of decades.
It’s not an easy problem to fix, but it is an important one, and we’ve been brainstorming. We could all start a smear campaign against every self-indulgent GoFundMe loser we see. We could go back to a simpler time, when kids realize that their private education itself is a privilege, let alone extra globe-trotting. That solution would require a time machine, which we don’t have the money for. We don’t have much money for anything these days, what with the loans (see: tangential anecdote in above paragraph,) but with a little bit of your help, maybe we could pull off a real solution. That’s why we’ve decided to set up a GoFundMe against GoFundMes. With your help in the form of funds, we’re going to dismantle this corrupt system.
If there’s one thing the United States needs, it’s fewer problems and more solutions. That’s why the Doctors’ Orders Fund for Educational Purposes (DOFEP) is all about solutions. We’re going to solve every problem — and the more money we can raise, the better the solutions.
Let’s start for those low hanging stretch goals — $25 will buy us each a pizza and solve world hunger, two people at a time. It must be said that this is merely a temporary solution. Take it from Biggie: mo’ money, mo’ problems, mo’ crowdfunded solutions. We have more long-lasting solutions, too, including some pretty promising time machine blueprints that will pay for themselves in no time. Seriously, it’s an investor’s market. Throw money at us.