In the book the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, there is an eery tale of disfused responsibility that has always stuck with me. A woman, Kitty Genosvise, was walking home in Brooklyn and was brutally attacked and murdered. When the police when door to door in the neighborhood to collect facts they fully expected no one to have seen anything of the crime, since Kitty had been left in the street and received no assistance during the crime. What they found shattered the city and was front page news for months and was later the impetus for many psychological studies. They found that many people had seen the crime, but all had assumed that others would assist and/or call the police. Instead, because they all assumed someone else would do the right thing, no one did.
Diffused responsiblity is the modern day challenge to the problem of poverty and hunger in America as well. Even with the strugling economy and uncertainty, we live in the most prosperous nation in the history of mankind, yet we have thousands of homeless children in Pierce County, WA, let alone the state of Washington at large. Emergency food and family shelters are full each night and there hasn’t an increase in shelter beds in decades despite the fact that we are serving more homeless than ever before.
Why don’t we have a stronger movement to stop hunger and homelessness? Because it’s everyone’s responsiblity, and therefore no one’s responsiblity.
Yet that’s not acceptable and so therefore we have to have a personal creed of responsibility to inform our activism and define where we will individually take action.
Here’s a few ideas for each citizen to consider as a responsibility:
1. Making Hunger Unacceptable. It doesn’t take much to alleviate hunger, and it’s something literally everyone can be a part of. Building emergency food supplies in Pierce County is as simple as taking those cans of foods you never touch out of your cupboard and donating them to Emergency Food Network, the Rescue Mission, Salvation Army or the care center of your choice. In addition, many could easily buy an extra bag of rice or box of ramen at your local Costco for just a few dollars and help provide someone with a little something to eat.
2. Making a Plan. Every citizen who is old enough to have life insurance should be making plan for their estate to bless the poor and feed the hungry through Estate Planning. This means putting a portion of what your have accumulated aside at the end of your life to help others, just as you have during your lifetime.
3. Personal Gleaning Projects. Gleaning is a biblical concept, forgotten but now beginning to get momentum once again. It simply means not picking every piece of fruit, every last bit of grain off the stock for yourself, but instead leaving some margins in your life for the poor and hungry to partake in. While most of us aren’t farmers in Pierce County, most all have some way we can create margins in in our resources to allow for others to be fed. Do you have fruit trees in your yard with fruit wasting on the tree each year? Do you have cars in your yard you never drive that you could donate? Do you have clothes in your closet you could give to others? Americans have so much abundance we often forget that we are blessed at all, yet precious few of us would be without ideas if we were to have a yard sale of things we never use. Personal gleaning means you are looking to use the margins, the extras in your life to help others.
4. Think individually. In the end, we’re all responsible for what we do with what we know. Take action and know that you are part of the solution to keep people from hunger.
What are other ways that we can personally be a part of stopping hunger?
David Curry
