Light a Candle

Most of us go through our days without being confronted with needy people, with the fact that even those of us in the U.S. of modest means are vastly wealthy, unthinkably rich, compared to a lot of the world. Maybe if, like me, you live in a big city, you see some signs of the need in our own nation: homeless people, beggars. Maybe you give them something, maybe you don't. We each have our personal rationales for what we give to whom, under what circumstances, and then we return to our TVs and laptops and iPods and probably don't think about poverty every day.

What about people who come face-to-face with unthinkable need and poverty in the course of their average workday?

Here journalist Michael Wines, currently covering Africa, talks about what he has seen, and how he finds his own way to deal with it:

I have encountered a diabetic woman too proud to plead for money for insulin in St. Petersburg, Russia, and flocks of street children grasping at my pockets in Moldova, to name just two of uncounted instances of penury. No Westerner can travel the less developed world, at least outside the lobbies of the three- and four-star hotels that now populate most major cities, and not be struck by the immense gulf between their own personal wealth and the utter destitution of the masses around them.

How to respond to it is a moral dilemma that lurks in the background of many interviews. Reputable journalists are indoctrinated with the notion that they are observers — that their job is to tell a story, not to influence it. So what to do when an anguished girl tells a compelling story about her young brother, lying emaciated on a reed mat, dying for lack of money to buy anti-AIDS drugs? Is it moral to take the story and leave when a comparatively small gift of money would keep him alive? If morality compels a gift, what about the dying mother in the hut next door who missed out on an interview by pure chance? Or the three huts down the dirt path where, a nurse says, residents are dying for lack of drugs? Why are they less deserving?

They're the same kind of questions I confront when thinking about whether to drop some change in the cup of a man or woman on the street--but with more extreme need, and, in many cases, more extreme consequences. Wines addresses the same concerns I hear voiced here--if you save this one, then what about that one? how do you know the money will be used for food/medicine/whatever?--but the bigger question is, what is our obligation to our fellow human beings?

It's a lot harder question to answer for us here in comfort. Even the more reluctant to give to a homeless guy would part with a sandwich if a person whose life depended on it were sitting in his living room. Would he give up his big-screen TV if to do so would feed a hundred starving people if they were crowded against his windows, littered over his lawn? Maybe, maybe not, but I like to think in a nation that likes to call itself decent and moral (and, depending whom you ask, Christian), there are more people who would than wouldn't.

But they're not up against our windows, not sprawled on our lawns . . . they're barely even visible on our big-screen TVs. Should we be giving up our lives of comfort to save a world that is largely invisible to us? If we give up some portion of our comfort, who's to say what portion that should be? Who should get it? Does our wealth relative to the rest of the world become immoral at some point? If so, at what point? How do we go about saving the world?

I can't answer these questions any more than anyone else. Michael Wines has probably come up with the best answer, or at least the most practical one: you light a candle--do something, anything. It will take a lot of candles. But we have to start somewhere.

Because something is more than nothing. And doing nothing has to be wrong.