Facing the Ogres of Progress

By Tom Peterson | Heifer Senior Vice President of Communications & Marketing 

Waiting with my younger son in the elementary school auditorium for the holiday program to begin, I ask what he learned in school that day. “VCCV,” he says.

“VCCV? What’s that?”

You know, Vowel, Consonant, Consonant, Vowel. He then looks at a banner on the auditorium wall that reads “Progress!” “Like O-G-R-E,” he says. \ I laugh; I had never noticed the “ogre” in “progress.” But there it is, right in the middle, big as, well, an ogre. In fact, ogres are always in the center of progress. Ending slavery, the civil rights advances, women’s suffrage, improved labor laws and other social changes have never occurred without taking them on. Sometimes ogres literally have attack dogs, guns, prisons and sophisticated propaganda machines. They may kill us if we make trouble. Other times, the ogre is inside us—an emotional block or the need to change a habit. But taking on ogres is something we avoid. Even when it is to our advantage, change is hard, uncomfortable.

Ogres are not new to our world. A good parallel for the enormity of ending poverty today can be found in the 19th century struggle to end slavery. In the 1830s, most citizens north of the Mason-Dixon Line avoided facing slavery for many of the reasons we avoid today’s poverty. They didn’t want to stir up trouble. Those brave enough to preach against slavery, from Pennsylvania to Ohio, risked being ridiculed, tarred and feathered, beaten, run out of town or even killed.

Imagine a jumbo jet filled with children, crashing before our eyes. Think of the response: Emergency crews descend on the scene, the world watches on CNN, a frantic search for survivors, but there are none. Everyone feels helpless and a day of mourning captivates the world. Now imagine that jet full of children crashing every 21 minutes all day long, day after day, and night after night. In the 1980s, when UNICEF’s James Grant first used the crashing-plane image, 40,000 children under age 5 died every day from mostly preventable diseases, especially malaria. Thanks to efforts of UNICEF and many others, today that number has fallen to 29,000 children a day. But at one death every three seconds, this is still not acceptable. One needless death is too many.

We can end global poverty and hunger, but only if we overcome the ogres of apathy, fear, cynicism and paralysis by analysis.

Ironically, this is the toughest ogre we citizens of a wealthy society face. We could help end poverty for millions, but it’s just not that pressing. We’re distracted by a television show, a sporting event and our daily routine. When a reporter asked him for the definition of happiness, playwright Tennessee Williams responded, “Insensitivity, I guess.” If insensitivity is the key to happiness, then considering our limited concern for the suffering of others, this nation must at times be ecstatic!

Is it really natural to be so concerned with buying more that we forget the issues of our day? Advertisers in the U.S. spent $286 billion in 2006 to convince us to buy stuff we mostly don’t need. Author Mary Pipher points out that, on average, we will see or hear 3,000 ads a day. “Advertisers design narratives to sell polluting, unhealthy, useless products,” she says. “Cigarettes and alcohol are depicted as refreshing. Ads miseducate our children about the nature of happiness, teaching them just the opposite of what all the world’s great religions teach. In brief, advertising tells you that to feel good you need to buy something you do not need. The comedian George Carlin eloquently expressed it this way: ‘Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.’”

Pipher asks us to imagine a world with no ads or to “imagine our country instead with three thousand messages a day encouraging us to eat more fruits and vegetables, brush our teeth, call our great aunt, and behave kindly toward one another.” We can seek meaning by giving of ourselves.

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan popularized the phrase “global village,” which has come to mean that we are all connected—through the Internet, trade, travel and so on—to become one small community. If, in fact, the world is now a village, then we live in a house next door to the hard-working, struggling family who lives in a cardboard shack, with barefoot, half-naked children, one of whom is suffering from a disease that could be cured with a visit to a clinic (if there were one) and a small dose of medicine worth pennies. They are our neighbors who we choose every day to see or not to see.

Post World War II children grew up asking, “If we knew that millions of Jews and others were being killed in concentration camps, why didn’t we do something?” Answers varied from, “We didn’t know,” to, “Nothing could be done.” The phrase “Never again!” grew from that experience—never again would the world stand by and let an entire people be the target of genocide. While many genocides have occurred since—Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo and now Darfur, to name a few—we can take steps to change that.

The opposite of apathy is engagement, engagement of any kind. When we face the ogre of apathy, we do something, no matter how small it may feel to us. It is a beginning. We can learn from the youthful wisdom of Anne Frank, “No one has ever become poor by giving.”

What are we afraid of? Just like those in the Northern states who worried about rocking the boat by ending slavery in the South, we worry (if we think about it at all) that by helping hundreds of millions rise to a decent level of livelihood, we will somehow have less. Why were Northerners afraid to take on slavery? Many feared disturbing the fragile order and causing chaos, possibly losing their nation itself.

Are we also afraid we will look foolish and naive if we engage in something and fail? Is the issue beyond our comfort level? Fear often comes from the unknown: “I’m not really afraid of the dark, I’m just afraid of what’s in the dark.” The first step to overcoming fear can be simply discovering what we’re afraid of. Will my income drop if I help a family in Uganda? Could countless destitute people somehow come into and destabilize my world? We can all remember a time we overcame a fear to do something important, how it felt to step over the edge. It usually feels great to take a first step; we grow and feel like our life has more meaning.

Ask a guide—a person or group with a like-minded desire to engage in your area of interest—to help you explore ways to get involved. I once joined a 30-hour guided tour of areas of homelessness in Atlanta. Participants were told not to shave or bathe for a couple of days before the experience, and we wore old clothes. Our guide, Ed Loring, who founded the Open Door Ministry, was well-known among many of the city’s homeless, so we had a sense of safety. We experienced the judgmental looks from strangers, were chased off a church parking lot by armed security guards and were kindly given ice water at a fast food restaurant. We went to the soup kitchens and the blood bank and spent the night sleeping on the sidewalk. The guide led us through a rich experience and helped us get to know homeless people in a new way.

 A cynic once said that the only way to keep hope in the world is to change its population frequently. To be sure, there is no shortage of reasons to be pessimistic. Cynicism can have two targets. A cynic may believe that people are motivated only for self-interest. No altruism exists. Or they may believe that something good can or will never happen, that only a quixotic fool would try to change the world. The cynic loves to quote this verse from Deuteronomy, “The poor you have with you always.” This is our reality; it will never change. But the cynic never finishes the passage: “Therefore I command you, you shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and the poor.”

When President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he was in part showing courage and in part playing a role that events had thrust upon him, built on the shoulders of a century’s worth of unceasing work by abolitionists. But when, with the stroke of the pen millions of slaves were freed, many were surprised. Abolitionist Ralph Waldo Emerson called it something “most of us dared not hope to see.”

There is a great gap between a cynic, who in Emerson’s words “can chill and dishearten with a single word,” and a believer who, like Emerson, does not dare to get his hopes too high, yet still toils year after year to accomplish the goal.

Writers Frances Moore Lappé and Jeffrey Perkins say the old way of thinking is, “I’m just a drop in the bucket. My effort might make me feel better, but it can’t do much.” The new way to think is, “Every time we act, even with our fear, we make room for others to do the same. Courage is contagious.”

Feeling overwhelmed by giant issues? Go to your local library, find the swath of yellow and turn to page 24 of the September 2006 issue of National Geographic. There you will see a chart showing the growth in adult literacy from 1970 to 2005. While only 51 percent of Asians could read in 1970, 78 percent can today. A larger jump took place in Africa: from 28 to 65 percent. Globally, we see a dramatic rise in the number of literate adults, from 63 to 82 percent. Increases in literacy rates usually translate into lower poverty, improved health and increased democracy.

In 1970, our cynic would have looked at the low global literacy rates (and in 1830 at entrenched slavery) and said that trying to fix this problem would be futile. Today, we say the same about global warming and ending poverty. But if 10 million of us are asking what one person can possibly do, the question changes to “What can 10 million people do?” Then the question becomes, “What couldn’t we do?”

Poor people around the world have been faithfully, often painfully, progressing on many fronts. They cannot afford our cynicism, and neither can we. Of all the issues surrounding hunger and poverty, which small piece grabs our imagination, which are we most curious about? We can take hold of that small bit and begin working from there. As Confucius said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” Engage somehow, somewhere, even if it seems futile. 

 Some of the current debate on how to end poverty can be found between two books: Jeff Sachs’ The End of Poverty and William Easterly’s White Man’s Burden. Sachs represents a more centralized approach, while Easterly argues for a more grassroots, bottom-up approach. While this important conversation takes place, tens of thousands of volunteers and professionals are not waiting for the final answer. They are in the field working somewhere on this spectrum to fight hunger. They are not willing to wait until someone decides which answer is correct, and thankfully, their efforts bring real change and a balance between thought and action.

Author Anne Lamott, speaking on writing, says, “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life. ... I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

All of the answers are not in. But the best way to learn is by talking to others and then doing. In the 1980s I attended the mission-oriented Oakhurst Baptist Church in Atlanta. With only about 250 members who met in a sanctuary with peeling paint, Oakhurst spawned a number of mission groups: a restaurant for homeless people, a residential addiction treatment program for homeless men on the third floor of the church, a Witness for Peace group and a sanctuary for refugees from Central America. The Baptist Peace Fellowship was founded and housed there, as was Seeds, a magazine about hunger, where I worked for almost 10 years. The church was also home to the regional office of Clergy and Laity Concerned, founded by Martin Luther King Jr. These are just a few of the outward-reaching missions of this small, financially struggling congregation.

For a small group to start a new effort at Oakhurst, among the other requirements, they had to ask two key questions: Is this task impossible? And is it likely to fail? To move forward, the answer to both had to be yes! Some mission attempts were fl ops; they just didn’t work. We honored these attempts as well and moved on. Had church members waited until they had eliminated all risk of failure and been assured of success, not one of those efforts would have ever taken root.

Not surprisingly, if we’re doing nothing because we’re not sure what to do, our results will be nothing. People who make a difference, who find ways to tackle social problems, usually draw upon many years of struggling with an issue before they break through. Nobel Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai puts it this way, “Unless you are struggling with finding an answer, there is a guarantee that you won’t find it. Your contribution will be minimal.” Or, in the words of hockey great Wayne Gretzky, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We may be made to repent, not just for the vitriolic words and deeds of bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people.” When it comes to progress, we are all flawed. We all have the ogres within us. But we also have within us the ability to defeat these ogres. A struggling family in rural Ecuador may face unjust economic structures, a need for land reform, lack of clean water and a sense of being isolated in their effort. They may confront ogres by joining with others in community development, by changing the way they plant crops, or by getting involved in political activism. Those of us living in the wealthy parts of the world will take on the same ogres as we fight poverty, but in other ways. And as we do that, the resulting progress can mean ending poverty for hundreds of millions of people, vastly improving their lives through better livelihoods, nutrition, education and health.

When Franklin Roosevelt gave his first inauguration speech in 1933, the country was in the depths of its greatest economic crisis, with 13 million unemployed. Environmental disaster had turned a broad swath of the nation into an enormous dust bowl, and fascism was on the rise in Europe. He told his concerned listeners, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

This is, in fact, a good starting point, a little courage to overcome a little fear. Many of us have heard the saying, “When you’re having ham and eggs for breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.” Can’t we at least become involved and then, as time goes on, see if we want to become more committed? If we do, we bring much more quickly that day when hundreds of millions have access to enough food, to clean water, to education and good health.