Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [32]
We might have come home demoralized by the degradation and suffering we witnessed, but we didn’t, because we also witnessed the strength of the people.
One morning we got up at four to meet with the men waiting for a day’s work on the docks. They told us of their attempts to organize a real union to represent them—and how everything had to be carried out in total secrecy. Anyone known to be organizing never got another work assignment. Living with little food and no security in the carton village should have sapped these men’s energy, yet they told of their goals and the secret meetings they were planning. They were not resigned.
Maria, a woman who had worked on the banana plantations and was then working through the church community in basic village-level education, was part of the widespread resistance to the Marcos dictatorship. Petite, soft-spoken, Maria did not fit our image of a revolutionary. (But neither did anyone else we met.) Her commitment was not just to the ousting of a dictator but, most important, to the building of a democratic society from the village up. That was why village-level education was a priority. She and her many allies used drama and song to make political and social problems come to life for the peasants.
We asked our new friends how we in the United States could help them. Without hesitation they told us that we should work to end U.S. government support for the antidemocratic dictatorship that rules their country. Without U.S. aid, Maria told us, the Marcos dictatorship would fall. (In 1981 the Philippines was the sixth largest recipient of U.S. development assistance aid and the seventh largest recipient of U.S. military aid.) She urged us to return home to explain to Americans that our security does not rest in supporting dictators abroad.
Maria helped me to understand that our role is not to empower other people. In fact, we cannot. Just as only we can confront the unjust concentration of economic and political power within our society, only the poor in the third world can organize to overcome their powerlessness. We must also understand that wherever people are oppressed, there is already resistance. That resistance might appear doomed in light of the mighty forces working against the poor—but many observers belittled the chances of success of our own American Revolution, fought by a minority of colonists. The struggle of the African colonies against Portuguese colonialism was dismissed just two years before its success. And even as late as spring of 1979, many doubted that the Nicaraguans would be able to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship, as they did in July of that year.*
Three years after my eye-opening trip to the Philippines, Joe Collins, David Kinley, and I wrote Aid as Obstacle: Twenty Questions about Our Foreign Aid and the Hungry, fully documenting this analysis. In the process, I learned that ending military and economic aid to repressive governments is not a separate “human rights” cause, because where people’s human rights are denied, so are their food rights.
Lessons from Africa
In the summer of 1978 I set out again, this time on a different quest. In so much of our work we study and concentrate on what is wrong in the current economic order—the injustice, the waste, the destruction. Yet we know that we will not be successful unless we are also working for something. Here we face a tough dilemma: how can we develop a vision without falling into the trap of believing that there is a “model” social order that everyone can simply follow?
In struggling with this dilemma, we came up with the theme of “lessons, not models.” While no society has achieved a model social order, there are powerful lessons that we can learn by studying the experiences of people in other countries, people attempting to establish democratic political and social institutions