What do you do if you a) love beer and b) feel you need to donate money to help the world?
Boston-based freelance writer Will Gordon recently decided to keep track of all the beer he drinks and donate a dollar for each to the ACLU, a nonprofit and nonpartisan legal advocacy program. That’s what we call a win-win. It’s like he’s tipping his bartender, but the bartender is also the ACLU!
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The ACLU made headlines this week by leveraging a stay (yay, legal jargon!) on President Trump’s recent Muslim travel ban, rendering it dormant for now. The organization also received $24 million in donations in a recent weekend, six-tuppling (just go with it) their annual donations in mere days.
“I just had this general feeling of impotent rage,” said Gordon to Draft Magazine. “
I’m sitting watching people being detained at airports, and I’m drinking beer and reading Twitter and wondering if I can do anything. And as this was spinning in my head, the ACLU was actively doing something good.
And Gordon’s act has been picked up by others, including John Laffler, from Off Color Brewing.
I’ll be donating $1 for every drink I have from now through the end of Feburary to @ACLU & I drink *a lot* Hope you’ll join me #drinkforgood
— John Laffler (@jalaffler) January 30, 2017
And still more are getting involved. Folks from Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee and Mystic Brewery in Massachusetts are pledging donations. And so has Todd Alstrom, founder of Beer Advocate, who announced they will donate $1 to the ACLU for every subscription or renewal.
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“There’s a level of guilt associated with drinking beer while all this is going on, beer being such an optional luxury item,” Gordon said to Draft. “I’m certainly not going to stop drinking good beer, but maybe I can use it to mitigate my role in the end of the world.”
Cheers to that!