Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [95]
As a participant in a Jesuit Volunteer Corps program, Annie Newman worked one day a week at a soup kitchen frequented by the poor and down-and-out in the Latino area of San Francisco. “I grew up in a middle-class family in Phoenix, so working at the soup kitchen shocked me at first,” says Annie, who also works at our Institute. “Seeing how badly our society takes care of these abandoned people really strengthened my commitment to working for change.”
From Larry’s, Sue’s, and Annie’s experiences, we can derive a powerful lesson: to cut through our own self-doubts and indecision about what we should be doing with our lives, it is often necessary to experience the real oppression which so many people face every day. Of course, such firsthand experience will always be vicarious; we will always “have a plane ticket in our pocket,” as Larry Simon puts it. Nonetheless, seeing firsthand the suffering with which so much of the world lives can sometimes jolt us into taking our own life choices more seriously.
Remaining Critical—Especially Self-critical
“Playing the hand one is dealt” does not mean simply taking the most obvious step uncritically. Working with pressing issues close to home must go hand in hand with an evolving analysis, an analysis constantly used to evaluate your own work. Larry Simon’s experience in the third world took him from an academic setting to more active participation at Oxfam-America. But having made that step, he did not suspend his critical analysis. Within only a few years Larry was examining not only the projects Oxfam supports in the third world but also the context in which those projects operate. Finally he concluded that Oxfam should not work in certain countries where government repression is so strong that it precludes the existence of any organization working for redistribution of power, the only kind of organization which Oxfam wants to support.
Hard Work and Balance
“Corporate executives work hard. Peasant organizers work hard,” Leah Margulies points out. “So must we.” Leah actually made a conscious decision to move to fast-paced New York City so she could “learn how to work hard.” Hard work and self-discipline were frequently mentioned by the people we interviewed.
This might appear to contradict the fact that these people are full of energy and excited about their work. Their lives tell us that passionate involvement must link risk, self-discipline, and hard work, with release and comfort to achieve a balance. Perhaps those committing their lives to social change today have learned something from the 1960s, when many people “burned out.” Leah Margulies, for instance, plays flute and bass and has performed regularly in a women’s band and a theater group.
Balancing one’s life to avoid burning out is an essential part of an attitude that working for justice is not just something to do for a few years before settling down into a more conventional life. Rather, the activists we talked to see themselves as part of a historical process longer than their own lifetimes.
“We’re in this for the long haul,” says John Vlcek of the Nashville-based Agricultural Marketing Project. “We’ve got to realize that even if we work our entire lifetime we’ll only have a certain impact, and a lot of that impact is going to be seen only after we’re gone.”
The most common link we found in talking to people working in the food and hunger movement was the tremendous change they felt in their individual lives. They began to experience themselves as initiators of change in others. For them, the possibility of change is