Writer Wendy’s weekly blog

When I was teaching at the local college, friends and I formed the CAB club: cynical altruist bitches. We believed that it was important to do good but that doing it wouldn’t make any difference.

Our fundraising model—although we never implemented it—was to rob gas stations and give the money to charity. But since we were all professors, getting five people together at once on that kind of schedule proved impossible. Hence our low funding.

We did get a grant once, $12 from the Provost of the College to buy red felt-tipped pens so we could correct errant apostrophes and statements of fact on public signs. None of us ever got prosecuted for the graffiti we left across town. My favorite correction was one of members who corrected “Vote Republican, Save America” to “Enslave.”

Cynics get a lot done, you have to admit. We’re grumpy and mutter things under our breath while we write policies we know will be rejected, demanding things like not promoting scholarship opportunities to students if they require a video application. Why do you need to know if the student is pretty? Or Black? Or Trans? (We did actually get one such application process changed; the problem with success among cynics is it deflates rather than fuels our contrariness-energized campaigns.)

Jokes among cynics are easy to spot, especially at Christmas. I admit, to this day one of my favorite responses when someone approaches me saying “Ho Ho Ho” is to snarl, “How dare you shame women like that?”

Cynicism walks close to bad virtue signaling. Recently some friends were grousing about how hard it can be to find the right words for a grant application to describe people who don’t have money and probably came from families who had experienced poverty before them. As the group shared how bad some of the options were—economically challenged, financially at-risk, perpetual poverty—someone asked, “Why can’t we just say ‘poor?’”

A virtue signaler huffed. “That feels like shaming people. The granting agency would and should flag it.”

A second virtue signaler tried to climb on top. “People who are poor care a lot less what we call them than whether we can bring resources to them.”

To which the CAB member in the group snapped, “We’re not bringing resources to them; we’re funding the salary for someone who will have to figure out what to call them in the next grant we write off their backs—I mean, on their behalf.”

Merry Christmas to all the cynics out there.