Charity next door

The last time we looked, ordering a new book or movie at Amazon.com didn't help support a single job here except maybe the mail carrier.

And looking around the huge conference room Friday morning at The Coeur d'Alene Resort, where TESH was having its annual fundraising breakfast, we were willing to bet that donations were not pouring in from Slidell, Louisiana, Haiti or Indonesia.

We're sorry to sound so provincial. We subscribe to the concept of mankind's symbiotic nature so beautifully expressed centuries ago by poet John Donne:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

But we also understand that if we're not watching out for our neighbors, especially when the going gets particularly tough, who is?

An ad in Friday's paper touted another wonderful nonprofit - 3Cs Cancer and Community Charities - and its Oktoberfest fundraising event Oct. 23. The bottom of the ad reads: All funds raised stay within the community to benefit charities including cancer programs.

This is not a call to blacklist Internet merchants or close your hearts and checkbooks to out-of-region nonprofits. It is simply a reminder that whatever you need or want, whether receiving goods and services or providing them, look first right around you. Like the little girl said, there's no place like home.