What Do You Do
If You Have A Million Dollars? (or more?)
What do you do?
I am already a very wealthy man. I have everything I could
ever want to satisfy my personal needs and desires. And I have
my health, and I am close to people who love me. These are people who care
enough about me to want to keep giving me things to look forward
to. And isn't this really what happiness is? Isn't this the highest
form of wealth? Of course it is!
Paying off all the bills wouldn't take much money, so almost all of
the million would still be there to help you achieve your chief aims in life.
Have you thought about this very much? About your chief aims?
One of my chief aims is to defeat starvation by the year 2017.
Why? Because I believe that it is wrong for twenty million
people (mostly kids and old people) to die of starvation each
year.
How can starvation be defeated? <grin> Good question! This
continues to hang me up. I don't know exactly how, yet.
As you will see, I have some ideas. And perhaps with your
help I intend to learn how to defeat starvation, and to defeat
it so soundly that it will never return to haunt our planet's kids and
old folks again.
If I were fortunate enough to have a million dollars, then I would use
it to continue to fight and to defeat starvation, to feed the children in
our world who are dying because they do not have enough fresh water,
or good, nourishing food to eat.
Here are some ideas about how I would do it --
First, there is a way to track our progress by watching for the
incidence of the "Big Five" nutrition-related diseases --
anemia
endemic goiter
marasmus
kwashiorkor
xerosthalmia
As the number of people who suffer from these diseases goes
down, starvation and its deadly effects will also dwindle.
Another task would be to assemble a group of like-minded people.
These people would work together in a spirit of harmony toward
one chief aim.
Okay, to really tackle starvation and all that comes with it --
hunger -- malnutrition -- undernourishment -- unclean water -- and
all this caused by poverty -- war -- natural catastrophe -- we must
implement a program similar to the one that was used by
fighters of the dread disease, smallpox. Sound like a big job?
Certainly no one could do it alone, nor will solutions come easily.
Sounds impossible? Please consider two points --
1) One hundred years ago and before, smallpox raged across the face of our world --
nobody thought smallpox could ever be defeated -- nobody -- yet,
through the concerted effort of countless unsung heroes who were guided
by organizations such as
WHO (the World Health Organization), smallpox was stopped dead in its tracks.
I had the pleasure of being a very small part of this. In
1974, just months before WHO announced the total eradication of wild
smallpox from the face of the Earth, it was my privilege to serve with the
U.S. Peace Corps in
Ethiopia,
the last great bastion of smallpox. I shared
a house with two "smallpox volunteers," trained medics who spent most of
their time in the countryside answering alarm calls and treating people.
And they taught people about basic health and nutrition. Each time my roommates
returned in their well-equipped Land Rover, they would report, "No
smallpox this trip." They would encounter chicken pox or other illnesses
that were similar to, yet much less dangerous than, smallpox. So each time they
came back we had occasion to celebrate! During the
entire time we were together they did not uncover even one case of smallpox!
Point is... smallpox went from a worldwide scourge to a laboratory-only,
research virus in about eighty years. This to me is proof that dedicated
people making a concerted effort can accomplish anything they set their
hearts and minds to -- ANYTHING.
2) The human population
of Earth has already surpassed six billion.
Each year, between ten and twenty million people, mostly kids and old
folks, die of starvation or nutrition-related disease. Do the math. Certainly, twenty million
*is*
a lot of people, yet twenty million amounts to only
one third of a percent of six billion.
Yes, that's 1/3 of 1%, or little more than 3 per thousand. So the "upside" is that
99.7% of the human population of Earth (that's 997 out of 1,000) will
not die of starvation in the coming year.
If the world can feed 99.7% of its humans, plus numerous other forms of
life, then why can't it feed the remaining twenty million people
???
What's up with that? What's wrong with this picture?
Along with many others, I say it CAN be done. Starvation CAN be defeated.
And along with a *f e w* others, I say it WILL be done. Starvation WILL be defeated.
Along with nobody else (that I know of), I say it HAS TO be done. And starvation must be
defeated...
WITHIN OUR LIFETIME !
People showed their stuff when those who could worked tirelessly to rid the world
of the terrible disease, smallpox. It is important that we not sit back on our laurels.
For there are still many things broken that need to be fixed. And for us
to allow the starvation of a relatively few small children and old people to continue on our
planet, when both logic and emotion, thinking and feeling, tell us that it can be eradicated, is
not a good and healthy thing for us to do for ourselves -- TO ourselves. We must fight this
killing and dying of old folks and children, and we must win!
"You can't win if you don't play." Come join the good fight!
As to HOW, as I said, we must first target starvation with a program that is similar
to the one used to eradicate smallpox. There is already
a concerted fighting effort going on as you read this. The "downside" is that
this effort is largely correction-oriented -- like firemen putting out
fires. So the next thing for us to do is to work toward a higher level of
organization of the effort. We must concentrate on the growth of
prevention-oriented work -- like a fireman visiting a third-grade class
and opening young minds to the hazards of oily rags, frayed electric
wires, and other preventive steps to take to reduce and eliminate fire
hazards.
There is no glory in this -- No way to
measure how many fires are prevented this way. All the glory is in
putting out fires and saving babes from burning buildings. So if you are
interested in glory, then you are welcome to join
Save The Children or
World Vision
and similar organizations, and help
them put out the fires of starvation. If glory is of little or no import to you, then
let's talk about ways to PREVENT starvation.
It is my feeling, based on talks with many earnest and dedicated
starvation fighters, that there is something curious about their attitudes and
behavior. I first came across this type of attitude while working with
engineers who designed electronics products. You may have come across this
before as something called "built-in obsolescence." Product engineers, usually
unconsciously, yet sometimes with forethought, include flaws
in their designs that guarantee a product's limited lifetime, and
that also guarantee that the company will continue to need the engineer.
Please -- DO NOT misunderstand. I consider any and all people who work in
grassroots orgs. like Oxfam America
and Meals for Millions to be among
the greatest of warriors, out there on the front line against starvation.
Yet, when they are asked if starvation can or will be defeated, the answer they give
most often is, "Oh sure, it CAN be defeated, but I don't think it ever
WILL be." Much less often you will hear, "Yeah, I believe it. I believe
that we will defeat starvation someday, but not in MY lifetime."
What's wrong with THIS picture? An attitude exists that must be rethought.
It's an attitude that unconsciously leads to behavior that slows our
forward momentum in the fight against the enemy, starvation. It is a
challenge that is rooted in the old "one step forward, two steps back."
One of the reasons for this (IMHO) is that these people have
"dedicated their lives" to this cause. They see absolutely nothing coming
AFTER.
After what? After the defeat of starvation. So a useful and helpful project might
be to help our fellow warriors recognize that there can be life after the
death of starvation. We perhaps need a secondary goal to look forward
to. We must have something to keep in the back of our minds to be tackled after the enemy,
starvation, has been obliterated.
What we learn from our successful campaign against hunger can aid us and the world
in our continued fight with whatever we choose as a next goal.
Back in the early 1960s,
somebody who *knew* said,
"We now have the technology to rid our
world of poverty
and starvation . . .
if only we had the WILL to do it."
*And*
this person
said it almost forty years ago!
What do you do? --
We share and "think-tank" PREVENTIVE ideas. We stay busy
in the fight against this... this ridiculous, inane thing called starvation, which is most deadly to
children and elders in developing parts of our world.
Send your thoughts and ideas now, today, to (email) --
OR... send them to (snail-mail) --
The WILL for Millions
2506 West Hamilton Avenue
Tampa, Florida 33614-4328
USA
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P e a c e . P i e c e,
Paine Ellsworth
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