My father had a crusty, lovable, gravel voiced first cousin named Eli.   On one of many visits with him toward the end of his life, more than twenty years ago now, he tried to straighten me out with a memorable rap.  He delivered it in his dramatic fashion, standing, as I was, looking up into my face, spitting slightly.

“You know, you worry too much about other people.  You should worry more about yourself, Bub.  There are three rules you need to get into your head.  First: comes me.   Then:  comes me!  And third: comes ME!!!  After that you can worry about other people.  Who are you to worry about someone else?  Let them worry about themselves.  You take care of yourself.”

Excellent advice I have always only marginally abided by, even as I often think of that very smart airline advice to put your own oxygen mask on before helping the child or panicking old person next to you.  I don’t know why I am so often brooding on things that are, after all, statistics.  No less an authority than Josef Stalin famously said “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million men– a statistic.”  As the genius William Steig had the fox say in response to the pretty little pig’s desperate question about why he was going to eat her, “why are you asking me?  I didn’t make the world.”  

It is beyond dispute that I didn’t make the world, why do I feel so debilitatingly responsible to do something about reducing its misery?  I am grateful for every advantage I have, but also inordinately troubled by the odds against most people, the invisible ones, the children of the invisible ones.  This is an alligator of a rhetorical question I am wrestling with, in a world where the majority of people do whatever good they can while trying to have a good life, while feathering their own nests as nicely as they can.  In a culture where the tide I am trying to swim against is a tirelessly promoted, never pausing, super lucrative torrent?  What hope can a lone fish have, swimming against such a tide, and why the struggle, pececito?

A little voice pipes up in response: the tide, however terrible or inexorable, ends in death for everyone, even for those who accumulate a million times more than they can ever use.   Whether you grow up in a slum in Pakistan where children die in massive numbers daily of diarrhea because deadly infections rage where there is no sewer system and many hundreds of thousands must nonetheless defecate in a limited space, or in a comfortable home somewhere where you can crap into a nice clean toilet in a room with a heated floor, your life ends when it is time for it to end, if not before.

How will you spend your limited time here?  If you have the chance to, and seemingly little choice in the matter, does it not make sense to push to the limits of your strength to do something you believe in?  The trick is finding the actual limits of your strength and not surrendering to that hopeless feeling you learned as a young child as soon as things become alarmingly difficult.  When the challenge becomes too daunting it is not unnatural to begin flinching.  If you would change the world, it will not do to flinch.  Or, if you must stop to flinch, Earthling, shake it off and get yourself moving again.

The children of the poor are born largely doomed.  Thus it has always been.  Billionaire monopolists like Bill Gates, once ruthless crushers of any initiative they could not profit from (like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller before him), turn philanthropist and spend huge sums promoting good ideas for improving the lot of the poor.  Why not put them in private school?  Worked for Bill Gates, did it not?  Just because the children of the slums might be shot by rivals for drug selling turf on their way home, or for any reason, or none, just because they may go to bed hungry and wake up in a ghetto, frightened, and facing a society that no longer has any profitable use for their labor, those things are no reason for their parents not to be able to use a voucher to get them into a private school, a charter school, if you will, outside of the public system.  That such a scheme removes the children of the most motivated parents from public schools while diverting resources from public education is no obstacle to its promoters.  Many promoters of this scheme have become rich and famous, while sometimes doing wonderful things for a small number of poor children, even as they arguably ensure the failure of one of the cornerstones of a functioning democracy: a good public education system.

A certain number of the educable few, raked from the rubble in the manner first described by Thomas Jefferson, will excel in these private schools and pass the standardized tests that virtually everyone in their local public school will fail. The most outstanding graduates will attend good schools and ascend to the middle and upper classes.  One in ten million will get their own TV show.  On that show they will say “only in America, baby!” to wild applause and they will mean it very sincerely.  

Most of the rest: massive standardized test failure rate, dropping out of school, death by gunshot, drug arrest, drug addiction, juvenile incarceration, teen pregnancy, a hard life in a dangerous neighborhood at best.  “At-risk” if you know what I’m saying. “Collateral damage,” yo.  If you can say it in a nice way, in a way that tastefully hints at the full horror instead of making it sound so horrible, why not?  Why dwell on a thousand kids from American slums stripped naked every day and thrown into solitary confinement at ‘joovies’ all over the country for getting into fights?  If they didn’t want to be incarcerated why did they violate the law?  And who is Amnesty International to say that solitary confinement of more than 15 hours qualifies as torture?  They’ve clearly never tried dealing with these feral fifteen year-olds.

I met many of these “at risk”  “collateral damage” kids at eight and nine years old: as bright and full of life as you and me.  Met them at an age when they had not yet been totally crushed by the odds they were up against.  I myself was soon crushed by the impossibility of helping more than one or two of them, of having no ability to meaningfully intercede on their behalf in the institutional meat-grinder where I met them.  Fast forward twenty years, dreamed up a creative plan to showcase their potentials, the moving parts of it seem to work.  Poised on a high, windy cliff, about to test the flying machine.  Why worry now?

Certainly no reason to waste energy fretting over why I am stuck to care.