What Are We Thinking? The First of Many Rants

A woman clings to her window seat.
2.5 billion people do not have clean drinking water. (Worldwide, waterborne illness is the leading cause of death among children.)

A nation obsesses over the sex life of a golfer.
An entire continent is ravaged by war, poverty, hunger, and illness.

Hollywood spends millions on an awards ceremony--and keeps creating MORE awards ceremonies. (BTW, where are the awards ceremonies for parents? Teachers? Medical professionals? Social workers?)
$60 will feed, clothe, house, and educate a child in Viet Nam for an entire year.

Mary Pipher writes about how our global cultural can make us more apathetic because the needs seem both so far away and so overwhelmingly huge at the same time. She contrasts this to a community culture, where the needs a person is aware of are both close and usually manageable. She argues that being more aware of more of the world and its needs actually makes us less involved because it's too big and too distant. Our minds and bodies literally do not know how to reconcile the desire to act with the inability to do so; the defense mechanism becomes to shut down, to withdraw, to develop tunnel vision. And so we give more news coverage to an adulterous athlete than we do to genocide.

I do not claim to have any answers. I do know that I am learning to take my global citizenship very seriously. Does it matter that I purchased Christmas presents from Amnesty International this year instead of Target? Does it matter that I recycle? Does it matter that I think more carefully now about where I spend my money and my time? Does it matter what I write? Does it matter what I teach my children? Does it matter that I vote? After all, I am only 1 of 6,000,000,000. It is easy to feel insignificant and thus to act insignificantly. It is easy to feel powerless and thus to act apathetically. Do my choices make any difference? I do not know if they do. But I DO KNOW that if I choose not to think about my global citizenship, then certainly my choices and actions do not make any difference at all.

Or maybe that's not true either. Not thinking about something is a choice in and of itself and has its own consequences--makes its own kind of difference. Maybe what it boils down to is that I can only be at peace with myself if I take my global citizenship seriously. The alternative is no longer acceptable to me.