Be Thankful for Complainers

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Tomorrow, be thankful for complainers. Just when you thought you were the only one who had really boring dreams and always used the one stall that was out of toilet paper, a Finnish choir group has come along to express solidarity with all those suffering from these minor disturbances.

The Complaints Choir of Helsinki, singing beautifully in Finnish, has made public appearances in its Scandinavian homeland, and recently online through blogs and YouTube.

There is something to be said for a multitude of ringing voices singing their gripes and grievances about everything from the mundane (“Reference numbers are too long” and “The battery on my mobile is always going flat”) to the more sublime protests (“Bullshitters get on too well in life” and “People have no time for fair trade goods, but rush to where they grow”). Sometimes it’s a combination of both (“I can’t escape the headlines of the tabloids”).

I would love to have this choir sing their refrain of “Christmas season starts earlier every year” at a Starbucks, where they start playing carols and peddling snowflake-adorned coffee paraphernalia the day after Halloween. It drives me crazy.

Of course, I guess I could stop going to Starbucks. But then I couldn’t complain. And what would be the beauty in that?

–Caroline Dobuzinskis

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Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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