A month or so ago, a nice young woman came to my door soliciting donations for Amnesty International. She told me about what they were involved in and about their mission and goals. I told her that it sounded like a worthy cause, reached in to my pocket and extracted twenty hard earned dollars.
Unfortunately, she said, Amnesty soliciters were not allowed to accept cash. Something of a security issue. That's all well and good, I can appreciate that she doesn't want to be walking around with wads of cash, ready for the mugging, but my problem lies in the fact that she would have gladly taken my credit card info for a donation: Argueably far more valueable than a twenty and more volatile to my personal finances should it fall into the wrong hands.
There is something that makes me twitch when i hear about organizations that don't take cash. Cash is money. I try my best to not give the bank more than they deserve, and the unfortunate integration of a 'cashless' society into Canada is nothing more than a way for the banks to get rich off of service fees. If Amnesty doesn't want my money, they can't have it. They are an organization built to assist people who have been accused (wrongly or otherwise) of criminal acitivity and mistreated in the process. The Underground doesn't run on credit cards and expense accounts, they use cold hard cash. Those idiots are cutting out untold wealth in donations by being pigheaded and stupid. Can't they just provide their door to door people with firearms for protection?

Raoul