Over $300,000 (and counting) Raised To Send Bullied Bus Monitor Karen Klein On Vacation

Yesterday, Chris Reed showed me one of the saddest videos I have seen in a very long time. I'll take it a step further and admit that it actually pissed me off, and I could only watch a few minutes of it before having to turn it off.

The video featured 68-year-old bus monitor Karen Klein being verbally abused by a group of hateful middle school kids as they rode home from their Greece, NY middle school. Even though I couldn't make it past the two-minute mark, the video went on for ten minutes - and for the entire duration of the the clip, you can hear the kids tearing down Klein with one hateful word after another.

calling her a bitch, fatass, poor, ugly, and various other words of the like. At one point in the video, you can hear one of the kids yell, “You’re so fuckin poor you fat ass,” in which Karen responds, “I try to live by some of these words, I try and it’s really hard,” referring to the words on her purse.

[via Indiegogo]

My heart literally broke for Karen, as it did for Max Sidorov,29, from Toronto who saw the video yesterday and was horrified when he saw the abuse that drove Klein to tears. Max knew that there had to be something that he could do to help Karen, so he set up a fundraising page on Indiegogo with hopes of raising $5,000 to send the abused bus monitor on a nice relaxing vacation.

As I write this at 5:03 P.M. on Thursday, June 21, 2012 Max has over $336,000 in pledges. To put things into perspective, when I started writing this story, the grand total was at $308,000. There are 29 days left for people to pledge donations toward Karen's dream vacation. Hopefully, we can make her dream vacation a permanent vacation.

Ironically, just the other day I was checking out 21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity on Buzzfeed, but this has topped each and every one of those.