Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [41]
Well, at the age of thirty-seven my view of the good life is different. I discovered that a life without risk is missing the ingredient—joy. If we never risk being afraid, failing, being lonely, we will never experience that joy that comes only from learning that we can change ourselves.
Third, we can gain inspiration from our counterparts around the world whose lives entail risks much greater than ours. But this requires our seeking out alternative news sources, because the mass media rarely show us the courageous struggles of ordinary people. Learning about our counterparts around the world, we’ll come to realize that we do not have to start the train moving. It is already moving. In every country where people are suffering, there is resistance. Those who believe in the possibility of genuine democracy are building new forms of human organization. The question for each of us is, how can we board that train, and how can we remove the mighty obstacles in its way?
But none of what I have presented here makes much sense unless we develop a perspective longer than our lifetimes. Glenn, a volunteer at the Institute, joked with us before he moved to the East Coast. “For a while I considered getting into your line of work—you know, trying to change the world—but I decided against it,” he told us. “The problem is that you can go for weeks and not see any change!”
We laughed. Glenn was right. It took hundreds and hundreds of years to create the web of assumptions and the unchallenged institutions of exploitation and privilege that people take for granted today. It will take a very long time to create new structures based on different values. But rather than belittling our task, this realization—seeing ourselves as part of a historical process longer than our lifetimes—can be a source of courage. Years ago I read an interview with I. F. Stone, the journalist who warned Americans about U. S. involvement in Vietnam long before antiwar sentiment became popular. He was asked, “How can you keep working so hard when no one is listening to you?” His answer: “I think that if you expect to see the final results of your work, you simply have not asked a big enough question.” I’ve used Stone’s answer in several books and probably too many speeches! For me it sums up an attitude we all must cultivate. I call it the “long-haul perspective.”
A book on how our eating relates us to a system that destroys our food resources and deprives many of their right to food would seem, on the surface, to carry a message of guilt and self-denial. But not this book!
I don’t think the solution to the tragedy of needless hunger lies in either guilt or self-denial. It lies rather in our own liberation. If we do not understand the world, we are bound to be its victims. But we do not have to be. We can come to see the tragedy of needless hunger as a tool for understanding.
We can discover that our personal and social liberation lies not in freedom from responsibility but in our growing capacity to take on greater responsibility. The organizations and publications listed in Part IV can help—as tools through which we can transform ourselves from victims of change to makers of change. We can choose to seize these tools—not just on behalf of the hundreds of millions who are hungry, but for our own liberation as well.
* World Hunger: Ten Myths, by Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins, one of our Institute’s most popular publications, further explodes these myths. See our address on page 481.
* I cannot overstress the importance of this decision. I commend to you Jerry Mander’s beautiful book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1977).
* Aid as Obstacle: Twenty Questions about Our Foreign Aid and the Hungry, co-authors Joseph Collins