October 23, 2003

Chief Wiggles Toy Drive Update

The grassroots toy drive for the children of Iraq is getting lots of press coverage - and sending lots of toys to Iraq. Amazing for something that just bubbled up from one soldier's mention on his website of an encounter with a poor, ragged Iraqi girl.

Here are links to news reports from KSL and KTVX, two Utah television news programs, as well as the Deseret News and WorldNetDaily, and an excerpt from the latter...

Wiggles' heartfelt account generated 1,000 e-mails over the next 24 hours from readers wanting to know where to send toys, Scott Evensen a friend of Wiggles, told their hometown newspaper in Utah, the Deseret Morning News.

This outpouring of support for Chief Wiggles' campaign last month spawned Operation Give, through which more than 500 boxes of toys have been shipped to Baghdad and more tens of thousands of dollars have been contributed to finance the drive, according to the Morning News.

As Evensen described, volunteers lined up warehouse space in Baltimore and made arrangements to ship donated items to Kuwait at a cost of about $3,500 per shipping container. Evensen told the paper they got word from orphanages in Iraq that the children were in particular need of school materials and underwear.

"My sphere of influence is small in comparison to the task at hand, but who knows what the ripple affect will be of my small effort to calm the tears of one sweet little girl," Wiggles had wondered in his Internet journal last month.

Who knows, indeed.

That's sad. And revealing. I'd bet the children of Iraq are far more interested in crayons and toys, and their long-term views of America (and, thus, our success in the War on Terror) will be far more influenced by a package of crayons or a box of toys than whether Bush said Iraq was an "imminent" threat or said the opposite, or what bloggers think about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, WMDs, and the Rumsfeld memo.

I searched the September and October archives of South Knox Bubba's blog for any mention or promotion of Chief Wiggles and the toy drive. Nada. Then, for fun, I searched the September and October archives of another prominent Lefty blogger, Atrios. No mention of the Chief Wiggles toy drive. Surely, I thought, some prominent lefty blogger has endorsed the toy drive. So I ran a search on Kevin Drum's CalPundit, for the same thing. There was no mention of it.

Three prominent Lefty blogs. Zero promotion of the toy drive. Not a scientific sample, sure, but you would think one thing the entire blogosphere could agree on is that it's a good thing to send toys to the poor children in Iraq, a nation beset by war for decades and formerly ruled by a mass-murdering tyrant, and give the toy drive a few promotional pixels. Yet so far it is the hawks of the blogosphere who are busy promoting the toy drive for the children of Iraq.

Huh.

Incidentally, you can participate in the toy drive by visiting Operation Give.