If you are able to read this, you obviously have access to a power source and the internet. You may be reading this from your home, looking outside at the bitching cold and cranking the heater a couple of notches. Perhaps you’re reading this at work, surreptitiously “working” your way through the interwebs. Perhaps you’re in a library, internet cafe, or you have a mobile device with internet capability.

Whatever you are doing and however you are doing it, what you really should be doing right now is finding some coins that you can donate to the Warrnambool City Council’s Japan Day fundraiser. Because here is what you are not doing...

You are probably not reading this from the school hall you now share with several hundred to thousand random people, with whom all you have in common is that they are from your area, and they have had nowhere else to live since the March 11 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown. You most likely do not have to wait until a designated day to have a shower, on which day you will be bussed to a nearby area for your weekly scrub. You, dear reader, most likely picked an outfit from your wardrobe/bedroom floor/laundry pile this morning, and did not have to rifle through a box of donated clothes to find something to wear today. You are not unable to return to your home because presently the door is blocked by a car, pieces of your next-door neighbour’s roof, a tree from down the road, a ton of mud, dead fish and general debris. You have not been forced to leave your home area because although you survived the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, the family farm you worked for generations and that provided your livelihood is now considered unsafe due to the radiation flowing from the Fukushima nuclear reactor.

I’m not even touching on the emotional or existential crisis that this country is currently facing. These are just some of the logistics of everyday life for a huge number of people, people who will be living like this for years to come.

You, Warrnambool Standard reader, are not living this, you’re just not. This is why I don’t care how cold it is, what else you may be doing, or what excuse you may be able to come up with as to why you can't spare some coins. And I’m not going to bother being nice about this, I’m shamelessly guilting you into getting off whatever your arse is currently perched on and going to add a couple of coins to the fundraiser. Just do it. Now. Thank you.