mhuzzell | The left hand giveth, and the right hand driveth millions more into poverty

There's this old parable I heard once. I don't know how old, actually (and it might have come from one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul books my mother used to be so fond of), but it goes like this:

A storm out at sea has washed thousands of starfish onto a beach*, and a man is walking along the beach, picking them up one by one, and flinging them back into the sea.

"What are you doing?" asks an incredulous passer-by, "You'll never save them all! There are thousands of starfish on the beach, and you're only one man; you'll save maybe a hundred, tops. You can't possibly make a difference!"

The man doesn't stop, doesn't even look up. He just picks up another starfish and tosses it into the sea. "I sure made a difference to that one," he says. Boo-yah!

But ... what if storms like that are totally uncharacteristic for the area, but are becoming more frequent (and thus likely to kill many, many more starfish) due to global warming, which is contributed to, in part, by, say, offshore oil wells near these folk's seaside town? And all of this is allowed (and even encouraged) by their government? Wouldn't it be more productive for citizens to spend their time lobbying their government and campaigning against the oil drilling, rather than throwing starfish into the sea? Or at least for that man to say "Hey, I'm gonna handle these starfish right here, why don't you go fight the oil companies?"

Okay, maybe not in this particular instance. A storm is, after all, a one-off event, and the man only has a limited time to throw the beached starfish into the sea, after which he can go campaign and lobby and whatnot. In an acute crisis, charity is crucial and probably a moral duty. But what if the crisis is protracted? What if it's not a one-off natural disaster, but a protracted famine caused by economic instability? What if there's a much more direct cause or set of causes to follow and fight? Then where does one best direct one's energies?

What if, for instance, the UN World Food Programme buys food for impoverished people in poor nations, while, due to a right-wing consensus among economic superpowers, the IMF and the World Bank "strongly discourage" those nations from setting price caps on anything, including vital staples like rice, as prices have more than doubled in the last two years? The left hand giveth, and the right hand driveth more people into poverty.

I've been meaning to make a post along these lines for over a year and a half now, ever since someone linked me to www.freerice.com, a "vocabulary-game" website that donates 10 grains of rice for every correct answer you provide on their game. It's basically like a less-fun, solitary version of The Dictionary Game, except that the "synonyms" they provide are often not technically synonymous, being either examples within a category or in some cases only loosely related words. This led to exasperated ranting on my part (e.g. 'Lynx' does not equal 'wild cat'! A lynx is a type of wild cat!)

Pedantry aside, though, a lot about the website just bothered me, in the same way that similar sites where you click on things to donate things all bother me. I think it's the self-congratulatory ethos around them. I dunno. I mean, I guess it's always a 'good thing' to donate money to any particular charity; that the work that any particular charity does is always good, in particular for the people they help -- in the same way that it's good for those hundred or so starfish that get thrown back into the sea. But the implication of these websites seems to be that, by generating donations by clicking on things, you are somehow solving the problems they are set up to address.

And that's just... not true. No more than music can save the world, throwing money at problems without implementing structural changes seldom solves them. Granted, the UN WFP's website indicates that they do do some campaigning, but as the limp left hand of Worldwide coordination, they are doomed to be forever thwarted by the dextrous IMF and World Bank.

I... I thought after a year of mulling I would have a better way to finish this -- that I would have come to some sort of succinct, easily-verbalised conclusion. But I don't think that's going to happen. Instead, I'll leave you with someone else's frustrated wisdom:

"When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food , they call me a communist."
-- Dom Hélder Câmara

*Incidentally, the picture of the crab there was taken after just such a storm -- West Sands was covered in various clams, debris, and little thin-armed starfish, among other creatures. Though, by the time I went down to explore, most of them were long-dead, and the rest were soon to be eaten by seagulls.