Dying to get here

I’m still reading Eat, Pray, Love and I think Indonesia is my favorite country in this book. Her experience with Ketut the medicine man is so fantastic. This little man with no teeth has been sitting on his porch for decades, helping people who need his help even though he wanted to be an artist, because that’s what God asked him to do. He’s never been anywhere and a cup of coffee with sugar is the biggest luxury he can afford. The author answers all of his questions about the world and the West and takes him on journeys far beyond his porch, which is why he loves having her around. She describes one experience where she photocopied his handwritten medical journals because they were falling apart and irreplaceable. One by one she takes them to town and brings them back brand new in plastic folders. This is how she wins over his surly protective wife who had for weeks been giving her the evil eye. The wife makes her a cup of coffee one day, just for her, and limps out of the house with her bad hip to deliver it. I read this part of the book and started to weep.

What went through my mind is how amazingly easy it is, in most of the world, to make a significant difference in a person’s life. A little bit of coffee, a few stories, a dose of technology, and you can rock someone’s world. It made me think of something I’ve been trying to articulate for a week now. My dad sent me this cheesy PowerPoint presentation about the demographics of the world, represented by an island of 100 people against the backdrop of PowerPoint’s stock photos. I’ve seen this kind of thing, almost exactly, so many times over the years and yet something was different this time. It might be me or it might be the fact that my dad sent it to me.

I know it sounds strange but you don’t understand how stoic my dad is, how totally rational he is, unsentimental and not generally affected by other people’s suffering. The fact that he would forward this to me is kind of astounding. He has changed a bit since he started dating a woman from Peru. She has thirteen brothers and sisters, grew up in abject poverty and was kept in a basement when she came to the U.S. as a nanny and eventually escaped her captors. At first, skeptical of my dad doing anything for someone else, I believed that she fed his hero fantasies. They go to Peru and he’s the tall (at 5’9”) white man who brings money and clothes, and makes it possible for their sister to go to school in the U.S. without working in a factory all night.

The presentation says, in a nutshell, that 6 out of the 100 people on this “island” would have 59% of the wealth and they would all be Americans; the majority of the rest would be poor, illiterate and/or malnourished. We, Americans, aren't threatened by war, can worship as we please, and most of us have homes, jobs and food, which makes us wealthier than more than 75% of the world population. What are we supposed to take away from these statistics? What can we do? What should we do? I think everyone deserves to have what we have, and no one would argue with that. Everyone wants what we have so it’s okay to want it and have it. The next thought is that we should appreciate it or enjoy it more but that is almost impossible. We can’t appreciate what we have without understanding, not just from statistics, what other people don’t have. Travel and time spent with those less privileged is the only way to really appreciate what we have, and it has to be done regularly.

I guess the fundamental question is what will make humankind happiest: The pursuit of improving our own lives incrementally or the pursuit of improving the lives of all of humanity? In other words, is it more valuable to improve life for those at the bottom, maybe in expense of our own improvement, or do we at the top keep forging the way to an even better life? I suppose without democracy, without a constitution and a government that basically works, there would be nothing for people in countries with corrupt governments to aspire to. They would think that corruption is all there is. In fact, the countries where people are most excited about democracy are in Africa. Places where the people have literally, nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Then there are adventures like space travel. Years ago, I had a conversation with an old friend about NASA. He was complaining about how much we spend on the Space Shuttle and how much could be done with that money to help the poor. The number one cause of child mortality on this planet is malnutrition, something that can be cured with food. I defended space exploration as a necessary inspiration for humanity. Frankly, the money we spend on space exploration is a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on war, but that’s another conversation. The point is, a decade later, I see that he was right. How is humanity lifted by us landing on the moon? Does that achievement really trickle down into some kind of improvement for everyone the way that drugs for HIV or the Internet have transformed our world? No. Then again we don’t know what’s going to improve our lives. Some things developed to help us end up hurting people, and vice versa. We should continue to innovate, that I believe.

What does this mean for me, as an individual, to know that I am more privileged that almost everyone else on earth? Guilt will get me nowhere. Donating everything I have to someone else might make me feel good for a short while but then how will I live? I’m tempted to travel, like the author of this book, and stay in villages with people like Ketut and just make their lives a little bit better by bringing the world to them. When I was traveling in India, I met a man who was Christian; they are a very small minority there, less than 5% of the population. He, with all seriousness, asked me to take one of his children back to the U.S. with me. There was nothing that could be done for him, he said, but maybe one of his children could have a better life. He was desperately unhappy, and was the only person I met there that I thought that about. He told me that Hindus, because they believe in the caste system, are generally happy because they make do with what they are given. They don’t entertain the idea of having more because that isn’t possible. You see lepers with missing body parts, begging for food on the street, who are overjoyed when you hand them a ripe piece of fruit every morning. It’s the desire for more, and the knowledge that more is possible that makes us unhappy.

That encapsulates the American malaise right there. We aren’t spoiled and selfish because we’re rich. Most of us don’t perceive ourselves as being rich. Most of us know we could do better and have more and that makes us feel like failures. Our advertising has capitalized on that reaction for years, make us feel like failures and then convince us that buying whatever product is being sold will make us happy. (But that’s another conversation too!) It reminds me of the Netflix contest. Netflix is offering a million dollars to any person or team who can improve their recommendation system by 10%. The challenge has proved to be very difficult. Almost immediately, a few teams were able to improve it by 7% and eventually by 8% by building off of each other’s work, but the 10% remains elusive and may even be impossible.

See, we’re already at the top and we’re already living life at such a high capacity that improving it by 10% is almost impossible. We suffer and struggle and fight against that remaining 2% and the failure to attain it makes us miserable. We take drugs and see doctors and write self-help books and watch sad movies about people who make each other unhappy. Meanwhile, there are children in Africa afflicted with a disease that eats their face, right down to the bone, and there are millions of people all over the world living in refugee camps on borders of countries for decades, unable to leave. There are these struggles in our own country, however, and these are the struggles that we can do something about.

Another story in the book is about a musician that the author met. He worked on a cruise ship, cleaning 12 hours a day with one day off a month, living in the bowels of the ship, to save money and get to America. When he finally got to New York, he thought it was the place on earth where the most love was. He got a job and played music and eventually met and fell in love with an American woman. They got married and everything was going swimmingly. He had improved his life 500% almost overnight, just by coming to the U.S. After 9/11, however, he was arrested, detained and then deported, back to Indonesia, never to return. His marriage is likely over as are his hopes for a musical career.

It’s one thing to accept the bounty of our country gracefully, and do what we can to improve it that 2%, but it’s another to deprive others of having it at all. Our President would have us believe that what we have is possible for everyone, if only they had a democratic government. Maybe that’s true but to deny people access to what already exists and ask them to build it on their own is like telling kids in the inner cities that they can’t go to a better school but that they have to build their own better school in their neighborhood with no knowledge, tools or resources. The answer may not be to invite them all to attend the better schools, clearly they would be overwhelmed and no longer better schools, which is the argument against opening up our borders to everyone. People are already literally dying to get here.

But what if we, the privileged, gave our time, our knowledge, and our money, to help those kids, those schools, and those countries? We can make a huge and immediate impact. There was an article about an engineer who went to South America and was amazed at how little infrastructure they had and with his bachelor’s degree and fifteen years work experience, something most of us take for granted in this country, was able to transform a village and educate the villagers, vastly improving everyone’s lives there. He founded an engineering corps and brought more engineers from colleges in the U.S. to help other villages and gave these young people a reward they may never again experience in their lives.

This is the challenge I offer myself and everyone else in the top 75%: What can you do to radically transform someone else’s life? Now do it.