Please support The Fifty Beads and Fifty Cents Campaign (ongoing).

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What has our Pundit been up to lately?

Petitioning Pakistan to free a Christian convert convicted of blasphemy?
Fighting for a more petite-friendly fashion industry?
Generically asking retailers to stock more modest clothes?
Telling the US Government anime is the best thing for teens?
Protesting Seven Seas' refusal to publish the controversial masterwork Kodomo no Jikan?
Requesting a third season of Vampire Knight, a good-looking anime he's never even seen? (Alt. site here)
And getting a shuttle program at a college?

Yes, all of that and much, much more. It's been petition fever at A Blog from Atobe. Something about these famously ineffective online petitions excites our author. As it is, I was shocked I didn't see more "Free the [place n.] [#]!" petitions, and almost the only ones I did find were from annoying liberals, and received no support from me. The one I was gladdest to sign may have been the demand for a more petite-friendly fashion industry, due to all the kind short girls I knew in high school and college, as well as for the sake of cute little chibis everywhere. Beauty has always been very important to me, and I have always thought the ideal of the tall woman unnatural, and probably grounded in a feministic impulse to undermine the feminine, delicate, relative shortness of the fair sex. By nature, there is no reason at all an outfit cannot look stunning on a lady less than five feet high.

As I see it, this age is marked by the divide between cause people, who seek fulfillment through commitment to works of purported righteousness, and apathetic cynics. Whatever and how many bad things ought be said about ideological lemmings, they have the better of it. As Socrates argued in the Phaedo, misology and misanthropy are related, and misanthropy is fed by beginning with unreasonable expectations about human beings. Inflamed by the Rousseauian denial of original sin, and insistance on the "perfectibility" of man, people are more likely than ever to suffer a let-down when they realize utopian dreams are just that, and lose all hope in human goodness and potential. These are the people who spam good petitions, and create pointless, often vile petitions. With the latter example, the spammer's message, "HUMANITY IS GOD'S SIN", which he spent three-and-a-half days spamming several times a minute, eventually to reach a total above 60,000, is probably sadder than the demand itself, and demonstrates the nihilism petition saboteurs have imbibed. As a Catholic, I refuse to submit to that spirit. Not having too much to do, I take pleasure in signing good petitions; after all, I do not feel justified in complaining about something unless I do every little thing to address it first. Some online petitions might even be effective—I can easily see the pleas for the Pakistani Christian convert and a 3rd season of Vampire Knight being heard, since they each have tens of thousands of signatures, and I wouldn't be surprised if the shuttle program got enacted either. Few things a man can do online can be so sweet as lending someone your voice. Imagine, after a good petition gets spammed by careless heathens, the joy its creator receives when he sees one honest signature from a kind, concerned, unknown friend.

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I am now reading The Queen of the Damned, the third book in Anne Rice's Chronicles of the Vampire. Though an easy read, I am again astounded by her grasp of the essence of modernity. Her vampires are all individuals with varying perspectives, and sometimes utter (suspiciously facetious) praise of the 20th Century, but the oldest and wisest of them always end up realizing modernity's not all it's said to be. Here Armand, who lived in Renaissance Venice before he was made a vampire, speaks to the mortal Daniel, in his 30s. Boldface mine. The picture is from her Catholic period, if I may be so bold, and the saint pose—what could have been—is just too kawaii to pass up. For the life of me, I can't figure out why she's so liberal when she writes like this; just read how she describes birth control. From the way her vampire novels read it's hard to believe she was ever an atheist.

Yet at other moments, he spoke in rapid bursts of the things around him, of the eerie garish cleanness of this era, of the horrid acceleration of change.

"Behold, earthshaking inventions which are useless or obsolete within the same century—the steamboat, the railroads; yet do you know what these meant after six thousand years of galley slaves and men on horseback? And now the dance hall girl buys a chemical to kill the seed of her lovers, and lives to be seventy-five in a room full of gadgets which cool the air and veritably eat the dust. And yet for all the costume movies and paperback history thrown at you in every drugstore, the public has no accurate memory of anything; every social problem is observed in relation to 'norms' which in fact never existed, people fancy themselves 'deprived' of luxuries and peace and quiet which in fact were never common to any people anywhere at all."

"But the Venice of your time, tell me...."

"What? That it was dirty? That it was beautiful? That people went about in rags with rotting teeth and stinking breath and laughed at public executions? You want to know the key difference? There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone."

To complain, surely, is easier than to diagnose, but Tocqueville hardly said it better.

Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with selfishness... Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself...

Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. Selfishness is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition.

Ever worry you are not prayerful enough, especially for the conversion of Russia that Our Lady has requested? Ever fret that you aren't active enough in supporting alternatives to Deweyan public schools and diocesan token Catholic schools? The country's large-familied, home-schooling Catholic moms and dads are probably covered, but for thousands of good-hearted believers these thoughts are a valid concern, and until recently I was in the same situation. But friends, dear readers, I found the solution! Channeling Glenn Beck's Forty Days and Forty Nights campaign of yesteryear, I proudly present and inaugurate

The Fifty Beads and Fifty Cents Campaign

Praying the rosary has never been particularly hard. Clocking in at fifteen minutes, five decades take up hardly 1/100th of a day. But for laymen, whose lot is the active life rather than the contemplative, saying a rosary a day and doing nothing else for the salvation of souls can seem pretty empty. Coupled with 50 of some other goodie, though, those 50 Hail Marys can be pretty sweet.

You can imagine my happiness when I remembered GoodSearch, a Yahoo service that gives about 1¢ from the ad proceeds of each search to a charity of your choice. And included in the registered charities, if largely forgotten until I showed up, is the Immaculate Heart of Mary school, a traditional Catholic school run by the sisters of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Richmond, New Hampshire. As a longtime friend and occasional visitor of the Saint Benedict Center in New Hampshire, I knew of the school and its good work, but had done little to help them out. But that all changed a few weeks ago. Right in time too. After tying up some legal loose ends, Saint Benedict Center will soon start building a permanent chapel for its religious and the local Catholic community, so money will obviously be tight. But thanks to GoodSearch, I pinched in a little bit without paying a cent, and so can you. All you have to do is:

1. Click here.
2. Sign up to support Immaculate Heart of Mary school, and register and login if you want.
3. Search until you drop, need an anime break or get banned!

That's all! Someone tell me if it doesn't work. If you just go the the GoodSearch site and don't have the link, all you have to do is type in Immaculate Heart of Mary school, and verify your choice as the Richmond, NH school. If, like me, you get enthusiastic and search for IHM again and again, your IP address may be blocked even if you obey the rules, so it's best to space searches out throughout the day. And if you get blocked anyway, remember that library and school computer labs have untainted IP addresses galore! Just make sure to earn 50¢ a day on average. While the total may bring unsavory reminders of a president whom religious Catholics would rather forget, The Fifty Beads and Fifty Cents Campaign, is your chance to sanctify the denomination!

Though the money may add up slowly, particularly if you're careful not to get banned, this program is Robin Hoodism at its legal best. Yes, this is the bet thing since using a postage-paid envelope to mail to mail a brick to usurers! Ads on the Internet, as with ads elsewhere, generally com from materialistic retailers who try to incite your acquisitiveness and make you buy things you do not need. Many of them advertise on search engines. Funneling their money to a small, wholesome, rural Catholic school run by religious sisters is about as close to "Taking from the rich to give to the poor" as it gets without getting handcuffed. These people think you're gonna buy their junk if you see it on their sidebar enough times. Prove them wrong! GoodSearch for IHM!

Catholics are famous for their guilt. Since BadSearches are such a source of sin in the Information Age, GoodSearch is a very fitting form of penance. Of course, good intentions do not a good search make, but if the first stage of this campaign didn't go so hot, piously saying the rosary is a ready form of penance, often recommended by confessors. Fortunately, the Society of Saint Pius X just happens to be waging a 12-Million Rosary Crusade. For that,

1. Click here and sign up as instructed.
2. Pray the holy rosary daily.

And done. Simply pray the regular five decades a day. Even if you have a demanding conscience, participating in The Fifty Beads and Fifty Cents Campaign is sure to make the sin of omission an endangered species in your life. Wait, is there something more you could want? Celebrity endorsements? Hollywood is evil, but I have been able to reel in a couple from the Main Island. Mariya Shido, of Maria†Holic fame, has enlisted the entire Dorm 2 at Ame no Kisaki girls' high to help (admittedly her rosary is a little unusual, as it doesn't come in decades and looks more like chaplet beads).

My co-blogger Keigo Atobe? At least he's offering token support.