The anti-donation season has started in New Mexico. What a great way to start a new year!
Starting Jan. 1, leading up to the legislative session, New Mexico law prohibits legislators, several other public officials, candidates for those offices and anyone acting on their behalf from asking for contributions. Other officials covered by this law are the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state treasurer, commissioner of public lands and state auditor, any candidate for any one of those offices and anyone acting on their behalf - in other words, all the officials elected statewide.
The law calls it the Prohibited Period. For me it's an early glimpse of heaven.
For all except the governor and lieutenant governor, the prohibited period continues through the entire legislative session. For the governor and lieutenant governor, and anyone acting on their behalf, it lasts for an additional 20 days, which coincides with the extra days the governor may be considering legislation to sign or veto.
It's such a good idea that perhaps it should be expanded to a national break from all requests for donations from all organizations of all kinds: National Nobody Asks for Money Week.
On Dec. 31, as the tax year ended, I was besieged by emails from organizations asking for money - organizations I had already donated to, organizations with similar purposes, and some I had never heard of. The common line was that this was my last chance to donate during 2024 and take the tax deduction. They had been saying that for a week.
After I had deleted unwanted messages around breakfast time, I went back to my computer and found 10 new donation requests received between 9 and 11 a.m. Several claimed to have a match from a generous donor that would double or triple my donation.
More emails came around dinner time, including repeats from organizations that had sent solicitations earlier that day.
This frantic year-end turmoil came just a few weeks after Giving Tuesday, the charity extravaganza recently invented to follow Cyber Monday, which follows Thanksgiving. Requests started several days before Tuesday itself and also included numerous claims that my donation would be matched.
Giving Tuesday followed the political season, during which I had received multiple daily requests to "chip in". The two major political parties have made it easier to donate every day by creating the "actblue" and "winred" platforms so donors can give by clicking a single button without thinking.
We also just got through the "Coats for Kids" season, when generous New Mexicans were exhorted to buy a new coat to donate to a needy child. Many of the donation drop-off centers were outside a Walmart, so you might go into that Walmart to buy a coat, but I did not see Walmart offering discounts to people buying coats for charity. (Please let me know if they had such discounts and I missed them!) While I'm glad children are getting warm coats, I'm still concerned that we have such a fund drive instead of improving our economy so that low-income parents can afford coats for their own children.
And we could use a break from the endless fundraising TV commercials that ask us to sign up for $19 a month so that some children can receive medical services that in other countries are available to every child through single payer health care systems.