The backlash has begun. I’ve been reading comments about this weekend’s telethon for Haiti saying we should take care of our poor and hungry before giving $57 million to others.
What’s behind that sort of thinking? I do think there’s something in us that makes us want to take care of our own people, our own village, first. But human behavior doesn’t really work that way now that there are 6.5 billion of us. We didn’t raise $57 million this weekend for homeless and hungry people in the US. We don’t really see chronic poverty. It took an enormous tragedy to move us to open our wallets.
And even if we did raise money for our own domestic needs, a dollar raised for Haiti does not take a dollar away from someone here. We are the richest country (still) in the history of the world (although our massive debt is quickly changing that). We spend more than $5 billion a year on ringtones, $40 billion on pet food. $57 million is not a lot of money, really, by comparison.
So what’s going on? Seems like fear based in a scarcity, zero-sum way of thinking. We can sometimes feel there isn’t room for all of us on the lifeboat. And there’s no doubt in my mind that this kind of feeling is going to become more common as we go through the turbulent transitions ahead of us.
But there’s nothing useful there for us. Scarcity, me-or-you thinking keeps us stuck in fear and shuts down our hearts. We need to practice keeping them open.
