The Sanctity of the Individual

by Kyle Scheihagen
August 14, 2005

According to the UN, more than a billion people live in extreme poverty; six million children die of starvation every year; 6,000 people are killed by AIDS every day; and a woman dies in pregnancy or childbirth every minute. Faced with these numbers, what can we possibly do? How can we hope to make any difference? Why even bother to try?

This is precisely the sort of thinking used to justify inaction and indifference, but it is patently fatuous and selfish. I remember reading a post-Beatles interview of John Lennon by David Sheff, in which Sheff pointed out to Lennon that a Beatles’ reunion could make hundreds of millions of dollars for charity. Lennon, who was quite keen on moral grandstanding, but was, even more so, a committed contrarian, said something to the effect of “Yeah, but it would be a drop in the bucket” - i.e., there’d still be poverty anyway, so why bother? Presumably, he thought bed-ins and billboards were more useful.

Of course, Lennon may be forgiven for not wanting to be a Beatle again, and even for his sloppy self-justifications - such thinking is typical - but we can hardly accept his line of reasoning. The poor people of the world are not mere fodder for specious metaphors, nor are they simply statistics. Each one is as real as you and I, and that should be the basis by which we decide how much to help them.

The problem of poverty is not merely some abstraction, it is measured by every single human being afflicted by it. In that sense, it is not a single tragedy, but millions upon millions of them, each of which has a name, and a face, and feelings as deep as any of ours. The woman widowed by war, or the child starved by famine, have no use for our abstractions, for our convenient justifications. They are not interested, primarily, in geopolitical complexities, or dictatorial corruptions, or any of the other evasions by which we excuse our apathy. If, in their presence, we were to throw up our hands and ask that most popular of rhetorical excuses, “But how can I help?” they might reasonably reply “Help me. I am right here. I am hungry. I am sick. I need you. Please do not abandon me.”

Of course, faced with such a direct plea, a great many people would help. For all our greed and self-centeredness, we can also be quite compassionate as a species. It’s just sad how misdirected and fleeting that compassion can be. I have seen people weep at the ends of movies, crying, for example, at the end of Charlotte’s Web. That is fine - it shows their empathy - but it is strange to think how such concern is granted to fictional characters, when there are real people out there - babies too dehydrated to cry, for example - who are suffering unimaginably, but are ignored. How many people watching Schindler’s List thought of Schindler “My God, what a hero - I wish I could do something so noble,” never thinking that a Holocaust of another sort is killing thousands of people every day?

Yes, given the population growth of the last century, it’s a safe bet that there is more misery on the planet today than at any time in all the ages past. But therein, of course, lies another common excuse: “Why save some lives now, when that will only add to the population burden in the future?” Well, let me throw some more numbers at you. According to Time magazine the number of people living in extreme poverty in East Asia was reduced by 500 million from 1981 to 2001, in spite of the region’s enormous population growth during that time. Obviously, while questions of population are relevant, they are far from any excuse for complacency.

Ultimately, there is no excuse. Of course, I am not suggesting that we all do as Jesus suggested: “sell all you have, and give to the poor” - we are only human, and that kind of communism is beyond us. But the much ballyhooed economist Jefferey Sachs has argued that we could end extreme poverty in our lifetimes - indeed, by 2025 - if the wealthy nations of the world would donate a mere 0.7% of their GDPs to the cause. That is far from asking too much, and yet, only a few nations are currently meeting that mark (and the US is not one of them.)

But let us refrain, again, from discussing big numbers and national governments. The real question is, what are we doing as individuals for individuals?

Sometimes, when I lie awake at night, and I look at the clock on my nightstand, I think about how somewhere out there, at the very same moment, some child is suffering in silence. And I think of that child, that single, individual child, as waiting for me, waiting for me to reach out and help. Usually, of course, I do nothing - my selfishness is often overwhelming - but sometimes, I have tried, and for one child or a few, maybe, just maybe, that small effort has made all the difference.

And what about you? Somewhere, right now, someone is waiting, helpless but for the help that you, and you alone, might give. They are waiting for you. What will you do?