Luis Lang would like you to send him some money.
He has taken to GoFundMe (gofundme.com/s78e9w), the crowd-funding website, trying to raise $30,000. Lang, who is 49 and lives in Fort Mills, S.C., is slowly losing his eyesight to diabetes. Without surgery, he’ll go blind. Those grim facts notwithstanding, some may not find Lang the most sympathetic candidate for charity.
In the first place, as some observers noted after reading about him in a Charlotte Observer story by Ann Doss Helms, he has a $300,000 home and a wife who doesn’t work; why, they ask, can’t he raise the money from them?
In the second place, Lang has had diabetes for years, but has not always followed doctors’ advice to control it.
In the third place, he’s a smoker who is still smoking despite his bleak prognosis.