Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

I really felt some strong emotions while reading through this.<p>It&#x27;s amazing.<p>The news spot just has to the the cherry on top. So happy for this kid that he had an awesome day.<p>It does restore some faith in humanity to see things like this.<p>...however...<p>I hate myself for being the contrarian in this case but as a South African and having worked with one or two NGOs that work with sick people in general, including kids with AIDS I can&#x27;t help but wonder how far the budget and effort put into this could have been stretched.<p>Granted, there are plenty aid organizations and shit tons of money (much of it dollars) that are pushed into Africa but if you&#x27;ve seen what&#x27;s happening here first hand it&#x27;s very hard not to think about what could be done with every single cent and every ounce of human energy.<p>I remember coming home one day after seeing some particularly gut wrenching stuff and not even being able to look at myself. The food in my plate. The clothes on my back. My kids. A room full of useless fucking toys...<p>It&#x27;s the wrong lens through which to view these things. I know that in my head but my heart is breaking all over again as I types this on several fucking thousand rands worth of smartphone.

It&#x27;s nice to help suffering people.<p>The recurring pattern I see, however, is: We single out 0.001% of all cases, do something extraordinary, and make a big fuss about it in the media. All this to make us feel good about ourselves. What we don&#x27;t want to fix though, are the real causes of the problems, because that&#x27;s way less pleasant to do.

Sigh. Since when did HN become Upworthy and the glurge that went with it.<p>A child life is probably worth less than $1000, rather than that new TV I can assure you the money to an average charity will save a childs life.<p>Yet throw in Batman and a whole lot of Redditors and we&#x27;ve saved the world.<p>Hey it&#x27;s better than a normal street parade &#x2F; pissing it up at a pub. But lets get a grip on reality.

Shared the photos and story with my wife. We both had tears running down our face. We both pictured our son as batkid. People are good.

I can&#x27;t help but think this is mostly for the adults watching, just like setting up &quot;santa&quot;.<p>I suspect the kid would have been just as happy running around a yard or his block with &quot;batman&quot; for a whole afternoon.<p>It seems like he didn&#x27;t even have enough time to take in each event.<p>Still, I hope it gives him great memories instead of being ill and in the hospital.

Make-A-Wish Foundation, doing things that don&#x27;t scale :P

I clicked the comment link for this story just to see how HN readers would make this simple feel-good story into some cynical circle-jerk. Was not disappointed.

Making endeavors like this scale is an interesting problem. On the surface, this is inherently unscalable, but it does prove that a novel idea can spark latent compassion to create something truly awesome. The obvious thought is applying something like Batkid to third world cases, but it would end up helping out a few cases in the millions that exist. A cynical view is to look at this as an example of first world individualism triumphing over the greater need of larger populations, but I think it&#x27;s worth thinking about it the other way round - how might it be possible to use compelling stories like this to solve a larger population of problems.

Buzzfeed has a lot of pics of today&#x27;s event.<p><a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-make-a-wish-foundation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buzzfeed.com&#x2F;ryanhatesthis&#x2F;everything-you-need-t...</a>

How much did this cost the city? It&#x27;s adorable but blocking streets off and crowd control costs money.

Emperor Norton would likely approve.

So how can we get the same people motivated to work for a cure?

I think one issue with this sort of thing is people feel like they either have to feel warm, positive emotions about this, or prove that it is somehow harmful or at least not beneficial.<p>I assume there is some small benefit to this kind of action, but I don&#x27;t have any emotional connection or interest in it.

It&#x27;s a good thing this was posted to hn, otherwise I never would have heard about it.

Compassion begets compassion. For this reason alone this event was beyond price.

This is the only article I am going to share on social media in a long time.

But what would other kids think? Wouldn&#x27;t they get jealous?

<a href="http://vine.co/v/htbdjZAPrAX" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vine.co&#x2F;v&#x2F;htbdjZAPrAX</a>

made my day :)

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