A very thoughtful book that came out a few years ago, Strangers Drowning, by Larissa MacFarquhar, seems more and more relevant to our world. The author argues that some of us are so sensitive that when we put a dollar or two in a vending machine, for example, we perceive the starving child that money could have fed standing next to the machine. Or if we hear that a child in our community needs a home, we believe that the child's needs are so compelling that they trump whatever inconvenience might come our way by adopting another child. In other words, pace the book's title, such people take the drowning of people seriously and feel responsible for doing something about it.
In our increasingly interconnected world, it has become more and more difficult to pretend that not just strangers but people we know or should know are drowning. I facilitate letter exchanges between roughly 2,000 students in Ghana and the Pacific Northwest, and some of them are so very sad. Talk to most any school teacher across the globe--certainly in the Portland Metro Area--and you will hear heart-breaking stories. If you start volunteering with vulnerable students, you will start to hear such stories for yourself. People all around us are drowning, if drowning is understood to be struggling with poverty, abuse, fear of deportation, and other tragedies.
Does being human entail knowing these tragedies and comforting those afflicted by them? Does it entail seeking to understand and, if possible, correct the causes of that suffering? What does it mean to live a good life in the midst of so much suffering? What do we owe each other?
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