In this moment of such great need, don’t forget the kids
There couldn’t be a worse time to ask for donations to a good cause. So much competition for funding, so many people struggling.
Now, with everyone out of pocket in a pandemic, will readers still dig into their pockets for the Toronto Star Fresh Air Fund?
The answer to that question will decide the fate of thousands of needy kids. Do they still deserve to attend day camps across Ontario, or must they be shortchanged by our short-sightedness?
In a time of COVID-19, we cannot ask our children to sacrifice for the rest of us. We dare not demand that they continue to put their lives on hold.
It is precisely because we live in such tough times there is no better to time to give. For it is better to give than to take away their childhoods. Now we must see the world through their eyes.
Most of my political columns have focused on the impact upon adults — the elderly trapped in nursing homes and a workforce out of work. But, as the economic despair endures, many adults are getting a helping hand through seniors’ supplements or wage subsidies.
It is time to spare a thought — and a few dollars — for the young people whose fate has been largely forgotten.
Every day for the past 2 1⁄ 2 months, our children have been held hostage. Yes, young people have mostly escaped the medical risks of COVID-19, but they will bear the emotional burden longer than the rest of us and be saddled with the economic fallout for years to come.
They will pay a continuing price for this pandemic. Which is why they deserve your donations now.
For 119 years, the Star’s Fresh Air Fund has sent deserving children to summer camps to spare them the searing summer heat. This year, our 120th, is unlike any other — for the stakes are higher and the odds are tougher.
Thousands upon thousands of young campers are pining for something beyond bucolic country scenes. They are gasping for fresh air anywhere they can get it because they are suffocating in a city that barely lets them outdoors.
Their collective claustrophobia is something few of us have experienced at such a young age. Sheltering at home with my own teenage children these past few weeks, admittedly in our comfortable isolation, has forced me to think about the history of adversity.
This peacetime pandemic reminds me of wartime, the invading virus reminiscent of an advancing army. I have covered wars, and my late parents lived through one, so believe me when I tell you that the privation affects most people on the home front, not the battle front.
Cities are locked down and restaurants are shut down.
Schools are closed and hospitals are stressed. Body bags pile up and people wear masks. And people die, the major difference being that, in this peacetime pandemic, far more people are losing their lives — and sheltering in place — than in our recent experience of wartime.
My late mother, Helen Edel, bore her own childhood burden in the Second World War. I have written before of how she survived the Holocaust when her parents — sensing the genocide of the Jews closing in on them — arranged for her to be smuggled out of wartime Poland on false papers to work in Nazi Germany, under the nose of her enemies.
As a teenager, she concealed her true identity, hiding out in plain sight as a farmhand and innkeeper’s helper, toiling for Nazi overlords. Her keepers praised Hitler’s anti-Semitism at the table without knowing that a Jew was sleeping under their roof.
A pandemic is not a Holocaust, but it gives us perspective. During these past few months, as my own children have put up with the boredom of COVID-19, I have thought often of how my mother fended off the banality of evil, trapped in an alien world, fending off the virus of Nazism.
Her own experience of lost youth explains her determination to scrape together the money to put me through summer camp years ago and to see my own children go to summer camps years later. And it motivated her to also try, in her own small way, to send children she never knew — not just her own loved ones — to summer camps by donating to the Star’s Fresh Air Fund. Now it’s up to the rest of us. For 2020, the Fresh Air Fund’s target is $650,000, but it is not our only challenge. Overnight camps have been closed, but many summer day camps are still going ahead at this writing, though we cannot know what the future holds.
If an upsurge in COVID-19 infection rates prompts the government to order a full closure, thousands of children will be held back for their own good — and the money will be held back, too. Funds raised for this year by the Fresh Air Fund, whose administration costs are borne entirely by the Toronto Star, will be applied to the summer of 2021, when demand is destined to be redoubled.
Despite the uncertainty, we cannot merely sit back, or we will have to turn them back when they are ready and able to come. The only certainty is that, if we do not fund it, they will not come — and we will have failed the children when they needed us most.