Over the years, I’ve wavered with my support of the Kardashian Klan. For starters, it’s quite fine that they have no talent. I know plenty of people with little creative talent who value their personal life over their professional life. Most of those people might pounce on the opportunity to place cameras in their home in exchange for a hefty payday. Money is money. But if you’re going to gain fame in an entertainment industry with minimal entertainment skills, you better use that power for good. And that brings me to my current tirade of Kim Kardashian, who held an ebay auction for the Philippines typhoon victims.
Because the media follows her every move, people quickly picked up on the fact that she was only donating 10% of the proceeds to the victims, keeping the rest for herself. Kardashian finally responded to the criticism with a laughable defense, claiming “the people of the Philippines need all of our help, no matter how big or small,” and “I feel like I get criticized for any and everything I do.”
Because Kim Kardashian is not fully understanding the criticism, I will generously take the time to explain it in a kinder way than my blogging cohorts. The issue isn’t that she makes a bunch of money and only donated a small percentage of it. It’s absolutely acceptable to donate 5 dollars or 5 million dollars, no matter what your income. Help is help. The issue is that because the title of the sale claimed to donate the proceeds to the typhoon victims, it generated more interest, and a stronger desire for the public to participate. Because the actual percentage was not immediately apparent (it was in small print at the bottom of the page), it therefore appears as if Kim Kardashian is using a cause to get more money for a sale, only to restrict the donation to a mere 10%. In short, that’s deplorable. You cannot ride a cause to increase your sales and then limit the donation to the cause that generated those sales.
I fully understand that Kim Kardashian receives an inordinate amount of arbitrary criticism from a plethora of people who make it their mission to take her down. In fact, if you simply look at the comments on her instagram page, you’d have a little more sympathy for the star. But some criticism is deserved. And she cannot simply wax on with a woe-is-me rant to avoid the truth. She made a serious error with the Ebay auction, and the aftermath is deserved.