I have come upon a problem, and my analysis of the problem leads me to believe that it is not restricted to my own psyche, but rather, is reflective of the culture under which I have been raised.
I sit here, studying for a midterm test for a class that is essentially about helping developing countries. Most of the lectures and discussions describe the needs of people in some war-torn or poverty-stricken country, and what is being done to meet those needs. Being a class offered through the forestry department, the focus is primarily ethnobotanical, and includes scores of statistics, graphs, and charts. For instance, under the heading “Global Population Size, Consumption, and Poverty” the following facts and figures can be found:
• 6 billion people in the world today; estimates for 10-20 billion by the end of the 21st century
• 1.3 billion people live in extreme poverty—basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter are not met
This is from my lecture notes, and I don’t have the source written down, so I’m going to break all my rules and just forgo citation for now; you’ll see that it really is irrelevant to my point anyhow. Assuming, however, that since these were given in class that they’re from a fairly credible source, you did read that right: almost ONE QUARTER of the entire population of the earth is not even covered, fed, and/or clothed. Allow me to stop you there.
When my eyes grazed those numbers, my immediate reaction was to question how many times the smaller number fit into the larger one. Then I formed the sentence that follows the colon in the previous paragraph. Upon forming this sentence, my mind blossomed with images from national geographic of bloated little African children lying naked and hungry at the feet of aged mothers and skeletal fathers. That’s where my thought process shifted to something that was effectively, “What can be done?” which evoked more images of stacks of cash on the order of millions of dollars being delivered to some feed-the-children organization, enabling them to, well, feed the children.
Therein lies the problem of which I earlier spoke. When presented with statistics, I respond with statistics. Even though the response within me was fraught with emotional images and a philanthropic desire to repair the statistical error expressed by those numbers, there is no mental exploration provoked by the numbers. They have effectively allowed me to take an issue that, expressed in terms of the individual, references a man who does not even have the strength to type what I have thus far, and turn it into a collage of still shadowed images and cold bar graphs, something to be met with an increase in funding. I have quantified the world’s poor and have decided on a quantifiable response that allows to me help without having to get too close. I can join that internet group about Saving Darfur and suddenly, I’m a philanthropist without even knowing what Darfur is. Isn’t that a little bit sick?
The truth is, what those statistics say is that there is a man huddled beneath the awning of a public bathroom in Central Park against the cold and the rain. He is dying because he only has a pair of old leather shoes which he found in a trash can in the 80’s on 5th, a pair of jeans which are the only remnant of his old life as a longshoreman, and a long-sleeved cotton t-shirt that was probably white a few years ago. He is dying because a competing survivalist swiped the five dollars that our hero had found caught on the edge of a trashcan near the zoo, and he doesn’t have the strength or resources left to catch any more squirrels.
The statistics talk about a young woman who has been left with her seven younger siblings because the heat of the desert has suckled away her parents already. She has no shirt to protect her from sun poisoning because she has wrapped her infant brother in it to keep his soft, black skin from the ravenous Sahalien. She made a lucky find in some Cairo syrup left by a missionary, and she mixes it with dirt and doles it out in rations to her inadvertent brood. She is not dead yet, but her strength and will cannot hold much longer.
The failing of throwing around statistics to describe a problem is the distance that it creates between the individuals who daily suffer what we cannot even fathom and us, the individuals who have the benefit of the opportunity to reach out and help. The voicing of stats, facts and figures displays all the hunger pains and weakness and terror and sadness as colourful bars on a graph. They allow us to satisfy the emotional discord caused by the statistical disequilibrium presented with a dollar amount or a 5-hour community service outreach. They allow us to tell ourselves that we have done our part, and we’re globally concerned individuals. Since statistics themselves operate in a mathematically real field and they have finite limits, they allow us to think that such things as terror or sadness or despair are finite. Of course none of us would ever consciously think that, and I am not attempting to point out a moral failing of society, but I hope to shed light upon an area where we unwittingly limit ourselves.
I am not attempting to undermine the efforts of the thousands of charity and human rights organizations around the world; rather I commend them and theirs for their willingness to face the problems with eyes open. Neither do I speak hoping to curb people’s giving to these organizations, either temporally or fiscally. What I hope to bring about is an understanding that there is no ending to this story. People will continue to die in poverty long after we have spent our last breath. Ecosystems will continue to be shattered by invasions when our last dollars have gone. Civil wars will still rend the social and physical landscape of the globe when my body has returned to the earth.
We must remember that the man shivering beneath the awning shivers alone, without the company of the other 1.3 billion like him. The sister matron does not have a quarter of the world’s population helping to keep her crying charges from death’s grip. There is no quantifying these problems. They affect individuals, and it is of great import to realize that our duty to serve these individuals does not have a quota. When we help, in whatever way, we are not shrinking the bars on a graph. We are delivering a profound joy to eyes that for so long have seen only dark.
Forward
-Spencer-
"Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it."
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