Brandy in Vidalia

I just put a dollar in a clear plastic bucket at the grocery store checkout. The sight is so common that I've almost stopped seeing it--I grew up with that sort of thing in my peripheral vision, glance left or right while paying for gas, and there is the latest horrible tragedy. Usually it's a bucket in a grocery store with a picture of a sick child, and you know that the parents don't have time to focus on their child's health. Instead, they have distraction, and more stress, and the worry about money to draw their attention away from what really matters.

This time, Brandy in Vidalia, Georgia, was in a serious car accident and needs help with medical costs.

These buckets sum up the idea "the banality of evil." I imagine that visitors from other countries might find it barbaric that someone with an ill child would have to take the time to gather buckets, make signs, tell the story over and over again to cashiers, drive from gas station to grocery store, to collect change. And the change can't ever begin to make a dent in medical costs for a serious illness.

I often put money in. Sometimes I don't because the quarter or dollar I have in change feels so inadequate. Every time I see one, though, I'm shaken to the core by what we can become accustomed to as normal.