Laudator Temporis Acti

I received this email earlier this week and rescued it from the Spam folder:

Mr Micheal,

how are you doing today and how s things moving sir.sir the main reason i am here s to help me to save my family from puberty.sir i than God i have find your email.please my family don,t have money to care for me and my youngers sister and brothers even because of the puberty all of us have stop schooling.please i want you to help me to save my family from puberty.please i want you to send me money or credit card, so that i can get money to help my family from puberty.Mr Micheal i need your help,please help me .samuel s my name.i am looking forward to hear from you soon Mr Micheal.

No amount of money, alas, can save Mr. Samuel's family from puberty. Even if it could, the milk of human kindness has dried up in my breast. I feel today like Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance:

Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.