how to deal with the swear jar

swear jar:a jar full of money!so we have a bit of a question here, maybe you can help us.

about six months ago, we started a swear jar. whenever someone swears, they need to put money into the jar. a buck for adults, fifty cents for kids.

now, thanks partly (ok, well, mostly) to the colourful language of yours truly, we have a bit of money accumulated.

what to do with it?

here are five ideas we’ve come with up so far. which one would you recommend? do you have a different idea?

the first three start out with giving the money to charity. but what kind of charity?

  1. a charity that we all like, like the SPCA (society for protection of animals), or the BC cancer agency. an argument for that one would be: we transform something foul into something good. argument against: would it actually encourage swearing?
  2. a charity towards which we feel neutral and to which we would normally not give. say, the rhododendron growers of canada. actually, i quite like rhodos, but i have no passionate feelings one way or the other towards that non-profit organization. argument for: we would still give the money away, to a cause that is at least not unworthy, and at the same time we would not get any satisfaction from giving the money away, thus not creating reinforcement of the swearing
  3. an organization we definitely do not support. maybe there is something like “young nazis of america”, or some sort of homophobic organization. that way, next time one of us thinks about swearing, we’ll think twice, because we certainly don’t want to support these kinds of people.

two more, really variations on the ones above. they might have a bit more ooomph, though.

  1. give the money directly to a person/persons who we don’t want to support.
  2. give the money directly to a person/persons who we do want to support.

over to you: what’s your advice?

this is also my entry into island life’s how to group writing project, about which i found out on jacob’s group writing site. island life is in very good company, by the way: darren over at problogger did a group writing project with the same title two years ago.

here are other entries to that project so far:

(image by allie)

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