Dear Earl and Sheila:

on what it takes to cause an ideaís time to come. Several years ago, Gordon committed himself to run a marathon every year until hunger is ended on the planet, asking people to pledge money to that end every time he runs. He says of the 1984 Oakland experience:

While it is impossible to calculate such things precisely, it is generally estimated that some 13 to 18 million people die as a consequence of starvation worldwide each year. Strictly speaking, almost no one dies of hunger per se; instead, people who are malnourished (lacking specific nutrients) or chronically undernourished (lacking nutrients generally) die of diseases and other conditions that you and I recover from. We catch the measles and recover; others die. The same goes for colds, the flu, diarrhea, and any number of other maladies. What merely represents discomfort for you and me spells death for the hungry.

Itís difficult to communicate the magnitude of world hunger. Itís simply too horrible for most people to confront. Deaths due to hunger average out to over forty thousand a day! Recall the last time you saw a newspaper headline that proclaimed TWO HUNDRED KILLED IN AIRLINE CRASH in two-inch letters, or 2,000 FEARED DEAD IN EARTHQUAKE. Anything that kills hundreds of people, certainly anything that kills thousands, is worth stopping the presses for. And yet over forty thousand die of hunger every day. That works out to about twenty-eight every minute of every day throughout the year, and three-fourths of them are children.

Today, we are horrified to recall (or to first learn) that the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 killed 125,000 people. And yet, hunger kills that many people every three daysóall through the year, every year. In 1976, an earthquake in Chinaóthe worst in modern historyókilled 242,000 people. That may people die of hunger every six days.

Hunger simply dwarfs the other causes of death that concern us. Wars canít compare. Highway deaths are trivial in comparison with hunger. Murders are a drop in the bucket.

Given the magnitude of the insult that hunger is to the human race, why do we let it persist? Hereís the beginning of an answer.

One night in 1976, I happened to watch a TV documentary on world hunger with Aaron, who was seven at the time. It was pretty grim and depressing, filled with skin-and-bones children. Iím not sure why we started watching it, but we both got hooked on it. The more we watched it, the more moved both of us became. When the program ended, both of us just sat quietly for awhile. Then Aaron came to me and solemnly announced, "Daddy, Iíd like to skip dinner tonight and have you send my food to those children who donít have anything to eat."

Aaronís reaction to the program was probably typical of hundreds, even thousands of children that night. My reaction to him was probably equally typical of parents. I told him his concern was really beautiful and that I was proud of him. I told him his compassion for others showed what a good person he was. Then, I began an unconscious process of "cooling out" my son. I pointed out to him that the problem was more complicated than he thought. I told him it wouldnít work for me to send his food through the mailó"I wouldnít know where to send it, and it wouldnít keep anyway"óand I said it was more important for him to eat his dinner, grow up strong, and then perhaps he would be able to do something about the problem of starving children.

In the space of a few minutes, I had effectively convinced Aaron that the problem of world hunger was too big and too complicated for him to handle. In the process, I added weight to the view that he couldnít really make a difference in the world. Itís still painful for me to think back on that night, since it was such a perfect example of the process that has kept starvation existing in the world for as long as we know. Itís the same process that dampens heroism in the world more generally.
 

Enter The Hunger Project

My next contact with world hunger came in March 1977, when I went to San Francisco for a meeting of the est Advisory Board. The est training is a program of personal transformation created in 1971 by Werner Erhard, and the Advisory Board was a group of some forty or fifty people from various walks of life, who had taken the est training and who met two or three times a year to advise Erhard on what est should be doing in the world.

At the March 1977 meeting, Erhard announced that he had been researching the problem of world hunger for several years and was now ready to make a personal commitment to bringing it to an end. Although he was still not clear as to what it would take to end hunger, he was committing himself to doing whatever that might be. To add reality to his commitment, he announced that he was creating an organization, called The Hunger Project, in collaboration with composer-singer John Denver (an Advisory Board member) and Dr. Robert Fuller, former president of Oberlin College and then director of The est Foundation.

My own first reaction to the announcement was negative. As a sociologist and as someone who had been deeply involved in the issue of overpopulation, I felt certain that any attempt to end hunger would result in disaster. It would surely result in even greater overpopulation, producing even greater hunger in the long run. The commitment to end hunger seemed naïve and ill-advised. I was concerned that some people I loved and respected were about to look very stupid. And Iím sure I was worried that Iíd look stupid association.

At the outset, Erhard laid out what he regarded as the four major principles that needed to guide the end of hunger. First, The Hunger Project was to be grounded in individual and personal responsibility. Ending hunger could not be held as the task of government or of large corporations. It needed to flow naturally from how individuals personally felt about their planet.

If you have to keep people fired up, this project is a joke. If this project isnít natural to your Self, this project is a fraud.

Second, Erhard spoke of the project as an "alignment of wholes, not a sum of parts." By this, he meant that hunger could not be ended by a mass of individuals, each of whom would agree to do his or her part. Everyone involved in the project needed to be operating on the basis of a total, personal commitment to getting the job done. The Hunger Project, as a whole, would be the coming together of similarly committed individuals. At the same time, ironically, no one would be able to take credit for ending hunger. The desire to take credit, whether it appeared among individuals in The Hunger Project or in its relationship with other anti-hunger organizations, would be an obstacle to getting the job done.

Third, The Hunger Project was to focus more on context than on content. In Erhardís own research into world hunger, he had concluded that we already possessed everything we needed to know about the mechanics of ending hunger. We didnít need new strains of rice or new methods for storing or distributing food. Advances in these domains would be welcomed, or course, but they would not be sufficient to end world hunger any more than past developments had done so.

Erhard noted that there were already thousands of committed individuals working through numerous organizations in the trenches of the war on hunger. Whenever famines or similar disasters appeared on the planet, organizations such as Oxfam, Catholic Relief Services, the American Friends Service Committee, UNICEF, CARE, and many others sprang into action. Organizations like Save the Children sought to provide continuing assistance to hungry children everywhere. Others, like Bread for the World, engage in active lobbying efforts to get legislation and other government action to relieve the problem of hunger. The people involved in these organizations knew what was needed, worked heroically, and made profound contributions to people around the world. And yet, without broad public support, they were fighting a holding action.

What was missing, Erhard concluded, was a global context of commitment to use what tools we had and actually end hunger. For my part, I recalled growing up during World War II and remembered how everyone you met every day was deeply and personally concerned about the war and how it was going. Then I recalled the Vietnam era, when Newsweek had a regular weekly section on the war. I began to imagine what it would be like if Newsweek had a weekly section addressing world hunger. What would it be like if everyone you met was eager for news on how we were doing?

At about the same time The Hunger Project was being organized, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report on their two-year, definitive examination or world hunger, involving the efforts of some fifteen hundred individuals and organizations. Their ultimate conclusion was that the world now possessed everything it would take to end world hunger. All that was lacking, they added, was the "political will" to get it done.

The final generating principle of The Hunger Project was that of transformation. Erhard suggested that consciously and deliberately ending world hunger would both require and produce a transformation in the way human beings occupied their planet. If we were successful in joining together to defeat one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, successful in ending the misery of a billion human beings, we would never be the same again. As a human race, we could not end hunger and then return to being the hapless victims of "forces beyond our control." We could hardly hold that the problems of poverty, injustice, war, and the like were too big to be handled.

By the end of the meeting, I had committed myself, personally and professionally, to the end of world hunger. The changes I went through in my own mind with regard to the problem of world hunger had a powerful impact on my sociological understanding of such problems and certainly clarified my appreciation of the role to be played by individuals in solving major social problems.

Can Hunger Really Be Ended?

In the most literal sense, there will never be a time after which no human being will ever die for lack of food. There will always be people who get lost in the desert and starve. There will always be isolated individuals and groups who, unknown to the rest of us, are dying for lack of food. Moreover, there will probably always be famine situations, known to us at the time, in which people will starve before assistance arrives.

None of the above comments, however, invalidates the commitment to an end of hunger on the planet. Nor does it mean that we can only hope to make hunger less of a problem. None of those comments needs deny the vision of an end to hunger as "an idea whose time has come." Hereís why thatís so.

Today, we live in a global condition in which 13 to 18 million human beings die as a consequence of hunger every year. It is the condition in which we live our lives, just as we live in a condition of gravity. Everything we do occurs within and is a function of that condition. Our experience of who we are is "conditioned" by the fact that over forty thousand of us die of hunger every day. Those deaths are not exceptions to some rule; they are part of it. The death by hunger of twenty-eight people a minute is part of the routine of life on our planet at the present time.

Consider this analogy. Many of the worldís cities exist today in a condition of air pollution. Some days, the air is fairly clear; other days it is terrible; but every day is lived in a condition of air pollution.

Now suppose that all the worldís cities were to eliminate the condition of air pollution. Imagine that we did everything it took for all the ecological experts to agree that air pollution had been eliminated. That would not mean there would never be any air pollution. Forest fires and volcanic eruptions would, from time to time, pollute the air. Chemical plants would explode now and then, causing air pollution. All such events would be an exception to the condition of "no pollution," rather than a part of a routine condition of pollution. Those exceptions would be worthy of note in the worldís newspaper headlines.

Now, consider the analogy of airplane crashes. Although there is some statistical average for the number of people who dies in airplane accidents each year, we do not live in a condition of airplane accidents. Whenever an airplane crashes, we regard that as a tragic exception, not the rule. Those responsible for air safety undertake an immediate search for answers and actions. When the cause of the accident is discovered, steps are taken to insure that it wonít happen again: airplanes are redesigned, air traffic control procedures are revised, pilot licensing is tightened up. All this occurs because we live in a condition of no accidents.

When the condition of world hunger has been eliminated on the planet, people will undoubtedly die for lack of food from time to time, but their deaths will not be regarded as routine. They will be held as tragedies. They will be tragically worthy of newspaper headlines and, more important, they will be taken as a signal for concerted efforts to insure that they are not repeated. People will be shocked. They will ask, "How could that have happened?" and demand to know what can and is being done to insure that it never happens again. 

It is worth noting that the condition of no accidents has made air travel safer and safer. Every airplane crash, in fact, contributes to air safety. In a condition of no hunger, every death by hunger makes future deaths less likely.

The shift from a condition of hunger-as-usual to one of no hunger is an example of what it often called social transformation. It is something far more profound than simple change, like the rise and fall of interest rates or hemlines. Transformation represents a discontinuity in the flow of things. It is as though the line fluctuating up and down on the two-dimensional graph abruptly disappears and reappears on a different graph, a four-dimensional one in fact.

Hereís a different example of what I mean by transformation in this sense. Throughout the history of slavery in America, a body of legislation and of court decisions kept changing the nature of black-white relations, sometimes making slavery more severe, sometimes more lenient. The Emancipation Proclamation, which abolished slavery altogether, however, represented transformation rather than mere change.

Often, great social transformations come in the form of "an idea whose time has come." I want to spend the rest of this chapter by looking at what it will take to bring about the end of world hunger as an idea whose time has come. What will it take to bring about a global transformation from a condition of hunger-as-usual to one of no hunger?

The Structure of Hungerís Persistence

Over the course of the past seven years, I have talked about world hunger to a very wide range of groupsóliterally from kindergarten classes to senior citizen clubs. The nature of those interactions has revealed a great deal about the social-psychological structure of the persistence of world hunger. I stress the "persistence" of hunger, since hunger itself needs little or no explanation: people die as a consequence of hunger because they donít have enough to eat. No mystery there. The question, rather, is why we allow the condition of world hunger to persist.

Over the course of the past seven years, I suspect I have heard every explanation there is for the persistence of hungeróand have begun to grasp the structure that holds all those explanations together. At the top of the structure, many people say they are unaware that hunger is a major problem in the world today. They may recall Biblical reports of famines in the distant past and even remember something about people being hungry in Europe after World War II.

Interestingly, Iíve never had anyone argue with the assertion that hunger is a massive problem in the world. Even those who say they didnít know hunger was still a problem do not react to the news with disbelief. Rather, they act as though they suspected it was true and didnít want to know for sure.

Once people acknowledge that hunger is a major problem, they begin offering explanations for its persistence. The first explanation usually is that there simply isnít enough food for everyone. Hereís where people put the blame on overpopulation, as I had done initially. Many people have some vague recollection of Malthus saying that food production increased arithmetically while population grew geometrically. Moreover, people point out, India is a good example of a greatly over-populated country and one that has a big problem of hunger. In fact, the fabled large welfare families in this country would seem to fit into that pattern.

As compelling as this explanation is, it conflicts with the hard, cold facts. This has been pointed out in numerous ways. For example, during the past quarter-century, world food production has been increasing faster than population growth. More to the point, the worldís current production of grain alone equals three thousand caloriesí worth per person per day worldwideóabout the number of calories consumed daily by Americans at the present time. Remember, this is just the grain we produce. It doesnít take account of other foodstuffsóvegetables, fruit, fish, etc.óand it ignores the fact that many American farmers are actually being paid to hold back on what they produce.

No matter how you cut it, the persistence of hunger on the planet cannot be explained as a function of scarcity. Itís been estimated that we produce enough food right now to feed 7 billion people. And yet, of the worldís 4.6 billion inhabitants, about a billion go to bed hungry every night. So how can that be?

Once people have acknowledged that scarcity is not the cause of hungerís persistence, they have other explanations. (Itís ironic that everyone seems to know why hunger persists. Almost nobody says, "People are starving? How come?") Most of the explanations offered at this point are logistical (e.g., too difficult to get food where the people are), economic (e.g., people need money with which to grow or buy food), political (e.g., corrupt officials divert the food), ideological (e.g., capitalism is the problem), and so forth. These kinds of explanations are different from the earlier ones.

Thereís often some truth in explanations like these. Food distribution is often difficult. The problem of hunger is inextricable from the economic systems within which it appears. Corrupt officials do sometimes steal the food intended for the poor. Yet none of these kinds of reasons is a sufficient explanation for the persistence of hunger in the world. Perhaps the most powerful argument against this explanation is the variety of conditions under which nations have ended hunger in the past. To see this, we need to take a moment to consider how we would know if hunger had been ended in a country.

For the experts in this field, the best indication of whether hunger is a national problem is found in that nationís infant mortality rate (IMR): the number of children per thousand who die during their first year, as Iíve already discussed in chapter 1. Now obviously children die of many causes, and even in the best caseóSwedenóseven out of every thousand children die before reaching their first birthdays. Some IMRs are much higher, however. Some African countries, as we saw earlier, have infant mortality rates in excess of two hundred: more than one out of every five children dies in its first year.

Very high infant mortality rates are recognized by the experts as a good indication that hunger is a basic problem for that society. The rule of thumbóadopted by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and many other researchers and organizationsóis that an IMR or fifty or more indicates that hunger is a basic problem for a country. There are few nations with IMRs in the vicinity of fifty, by the way: most are either substantially below it or substantially above it, making a pretty clear distinction between the haves and the have-nots.

During this century, some fifty-three nations with populations of a million or more have reduced their infant mortality rates from above fifty to below it, thus apparently ending hunger as a basic problem for their people. Thirty-five have done so since World War II. Of particular relevance to our present discussion, those nations have ended hunger in a wide variety of ways. Some, like South Korea, have done so by emphasizing agriculture, while agriculture has played little or no part in the achievement in countries like Hong Kong, for example. Communist countries, like the USSR, have ended hunger; so have liberal democracies like Costa Rica and right-wing dictatorships like Chile. In Japan, the national government played a central role in ending hunger; in Spain, by contrast, the government was not very involved. In Taiwan, the family farm was the key to ending hunger; in the Peopleís Republic of China, collective agriculture produced the same result. Some countries have required massive foreign aid, others have ended hunger without it. Some of the OPEC nations have ended hunger as a consequence of becoming very rich, while other countriesóSri Lanka is an exampleóhave ended hunger even while remaining very poor as a nation.

Ultimately, it comes down to this. Whatever reason may be given for the persistence of hunger in the world, there is some country that has solved the problem of hunger in spite of that reason. We need to look elsewhere for the explanation for the persistence of hunger.

Growing Up and Becoming "Realistic"

One of the true joys in my life during the past seven years has involved talking to young children about hunger. That doesnít seem like a very joyous undertaking, I know, but it has provided me with some of the most powerfully moving moments of my life.

Iíll always remember the first time I was asked to meet with a kindergarten class in Honolulu shortly after The Hunger Project was created. A friend who operated a large preschool had decided it was important to let the children in her school know about the problem of world hunger, as long as it was handled in a way that would support and empower the children rather than simply making them feel bad. She asked me to meet with one of her kindergarten classes.

I can still remember standing on the concrete walkway outside the second-story classroom door, waiting to go in, still not sure how to talk to really young kids about something as depressing as world hunger. As I look back on it now, I can see that my main problem was that I didnít really think there was much a kindergarten child could do about world hunger.

When the time came, however, the door to the classroom opened, and I had no choice. My friend invited me into the room and announced, "All right boys and girls. This is Mr. Babbie, and heís going to talk with us about something I know you will want to know about." With that, I was treated to a series of shocks.

First, I had totally forgotten how small kindergarten children were. The classroom consisted of about four fairly large tables with about eight children sitting at each. But the tables seemed to be no more than perhaps a foot off the floor, and the childrenís heads seemed to reach about a foot and a half at most. I was seized by a real concern that I would step on someone or trip and fall.

Second, I had not been prepared for the childrenís openness and genuine love for this stranger who had stumbled into their midst. When I was introduced, they all clapped their hands and cheered. Then they settled back in a clearly excited anticipation. I was on.

In that first encounter with kindergarten children, I discovered that I am naturally more of a Mister Rogers than a Captain Kangaroo. I quickly found it possible to say things like "Hi, boys and girls" without feeling foolish or trite, and found myself naturally emphasizing all the appropriate emotions as I talked to them. "How would you like to play a game?" I asked brightly, imagining a cartoon drawing of a light bulb going on over my head. "Yay!" they all shouted in unison, squirming around in their shrunken seats and glancing back and forth among themselves in excited anticipation. And so we began our journey off to confront world hunger.

"I want you to imagine what you would do if you sat down at the table to color, and you found the table covered with books," I started. "What would you do?" About half the children shouted some version of "Move the books." "Thatís right!" I replied, and we all cheered.

"Now suppose you wanted to dance around the floor, and the chairs were in your way. What would you do?" I asked. "Move them!" everyone shouted, and we all cheered again. I could see we were on a roll.

"What if you came into the classroom and found that all the books had fallen off the bookshelf. What would you do?" "Put them back," came the chorus. "Suppose this raincoat fell off the hook." I stepped quickly to a wall covered with raincoats on hooks (about a foot off the floor). A small Japanese boy shouted, "Iíd hang it up!" And he looked proudly around the room as everyone cheered.

At this point, I launched into a more professorial talk about how, when we donít like the way we find things, we just fix them. We shifted from the classroom to some other real life situations. "Suppose you were in the Ala Moana shopping center with your mom or your dad, and you found a little boy who was crying because he couldnít find his parents. What would you do?" The children had no problem finding solutions. "Iíd tell my mother." "Iíd take him to the police." "Iíd hold his hand and say ëDonít worry. Weíll find your parents.í" I posed several problems to the children, and they quickly found solutions to them all. Where appropriate, they showed genuine compassion for the people who had the problem, and they always showed a determination to set things right.

Getting more serious, I asked if they had ever been hungry. "Can you remember a time when you were waiting for dinner to be ready, and you were kind of a pest, asking ëWhen do we eat?í over and over again. Or did you ever come home from school so hungry that you had a snack before dinner?" Everybody could remember such times.

"Well, there are some children in the world that are very, very hungry all day, every day. And their parents are so poor, they donít have anything to give the children to eat. Many of those children are so hungry, theyíll die if something isnít done right away." Iíd finally reached the point of my being in the classroom that day. The response was far different from anything Iíd imagined, standing outside the door waiting to go inside. 

The children in the class took the plight of the hungry children very seriously. There was no joking or kidding around. Nobody acted silly during that part of the dayís discussion. They exhibited varying degrees of concern, distress, alarm, even sorrow. And yet, there was no evidence of them being beaten down or subdued by the tragic news. Their reactions were far different from those of any adults I had discussed hunger with.

Whereas the news of world hunger often has a deadening effect on adults, it made the kindergarten children more alive. They wanted to do somethingójust as Aaron had that night two years before. For many of them, the most obvious thing to do was to give up their lunches, and several offered to turn them over to me so the children wouldnít starve. Some offered to bring more food from home. Others said they would tell their parents about the problem so they could do something. "Iíll tell my father. He can fix things like that." As a bottom line, they were simply unwilling to have children starve, and they wanted to do something about it right away.

As I reviewed my encounter with that kindergarten class, I initially decided that I had been really clever about the way I led up to the problem of hunger, dealing with simple examples of taking action when we donít like the way we find things. As it turns out, I gave myself too much credit in the matter.

Anytime I have discussed world hunger with young children since then, they have always wanted to do something right away, no matter how I have led up to it. Iíve become aware that thereís no need for me to plant the idea of making a difference; itís already there and simply obvious to anyone under six years of age.

Since I have spoken about hunger to every age group from kindergarten to senior citizens, I have had the unusual opportunity to observe an approximation of the growing-up process that individuals go through. Itís been an enlightening and also a sobering experience.

Up to about junior high school, the young people Iíve met with simply leap into action. The main difference between kindergarten and say, seventh grade, is that as children get older, their actions become more potent. Whereas a five-year-old is likely to want to send his or her sandwich to Somalia, older children may decide they can accomplish more by raising money for relief efforts, writing letters to public officials, and so forth.

At one point I was asked to meet with a seventh grade class in Nanakuli, a poor, rural, and predominately Hawaiian community on the west end of Oahu, about forty-five minutes drive from downtown Honolulu. Although this was my first time inside a Nanakuli classroom, I came equipped with a full set of stereotypes. Iíd been warned that the students in Nanakuli were not very academically inclined and that there was a lot of violence in the classroom. Friends joked about how I should leave my wallet at home, take a spare set of tires for the car, et cetera. I laughed at the jokes, but I made a point of parking my car as near the administration building as possible, and I transferred some money from my wallet to my shirt pocketójust in case.

I got to the classroom without any incident but, once I was there, my concerns began to grow. The students came into the classroom with a fair amount of shoving and horseplay. Moreover, the boys were much bigger than typical seventh graders. The stereotype about Hawaiians being bigger than average is well-grounded in fact.

As soon as I began talking about the problem of world hunger, however, the classroom seemed totally transformed. At the least, my experience of it was transformed. The horsing around ceased, students stopped talking to one another and were clearly taking in every word I said. They asked questions. They wanted to understand the details of hunger in the world.

It was as though understanding about world hunger was somehow vital to their own well-being. Eventually, I saw that hunger was very real in their lives. Although none of them was actually starving, they were poor enough to have known times when food was scarce, even in tropical Hawaii. This was no theoretical discussion for them. "Eh, I know two old people near my house that sometimes donít have nothing to eat. Last week, my Auntie took them some mango and banana. We should take some food to them."

By the time I left the classroom, the students had organized themselves to collect canned goods and to locate hungry people in their neighborhood.

In the best of all worlds, people would continue becoming more effective in such matters while maintaining their commitment to doing something. In fact, something peculiar seems to occur at around the beginning of high school. If you were to speak to a freshman class in high school about the problem of world hunger, you would probably find most of the students interested in and concerned about what you had to say. A few of the students, however, would probably appear to be almost unconscious. Even though they would have their eyes open and might even be looking in your general direction, you would have the distinct impression that they were not really alive. Images from The Night of the Living Dead might run through your head.

If you spoke to sophomore, junior, and senior classes, you would probably find the proportion of zombies increasing as the students got older. Iím reluctant to talk this way, since I know it will seem as though I want to belittle the students. Thatís definitely not my purpose, and yet I know of no more accurate description of the glazed-over, "nobody-home" look that seems to become more prevalent as young people move through high school. When you speak to a group of students about the fact that 13 to 18 million people die of hunger each year, they donít seem surprised, they donít seem to feel bad about it, theyíre not happy: ultimately, nothing you say seems to register at all. Itís an eerie experience.

Although I cannot say so with any certainty, I suspect the phenomenon Iíve been describing is the result of young people being told they are not capable of making a difference, even being ridiculed for their "naïve" concerns and intentions to save the world. I was in high school at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott. Living in a small town in New Hampshire, I had hardly ever seen a black person, and had no idea about conditions in the South. When I first learned that blacks had to sit in the back of the bus, I thought that was stupid. Why on earth should they have to sit in the back of the bus? Let ëem sit anywhere they wanted. When I began learning that blacks were being brutalized because of their refusal to abide by the rules of segregation, I was outraged.

I remember going to my teachers and my parents with the demand and expectation that something be done about segregation in the South. It was then I learned that "things were more complicated than I knew." It turned out that I didnít know anything at all about the history of race relations in the South. I hadnít given much thought to both blacks and whites growing up, being taught a particular way of behaving toward one another. I certainly didnít know anything about the economics of race relations, nor of the political dimension. And there I was naively demanding that everything be turned on its head. Ultimately, I got very quiet about the whole thing. I resolved to learn more about the world before I spouted off about things I didnít really understand.

I suspect thatís the same kind of quiet I confronted in talking to high school students about world hunger. It seems to me as though they had "learned their place" in the scheme of thingsóthat they shouldnít get involved in things they didnít understand or commit themselves to "naïve causes" in which they couldnít really make a difference.

Speaking to somewhat older people has been a little different but not really better. On the whole, college students have been no more committed to making a difference than the high school students Iíve been describing,, but they are noisier about it. While we might conclude that high school students are quietly devastated by the discovery that they donít make a difference, college students are able to explain why they donít make a difference.

Speaking to college students about world hunger is to invite lengthy discussions about how the world works, how complicated it is, and why things canít be changed. None of this is to deny past periods of radicalism among college studentsóstudents are less radical today than in the sixties and seventiesóor to deny the impact students have, in fact, had on national and world events. Weíd probably be one-fourth of the way to a Hundred Years War in Vietnam except for the role of the nationís college students in opposing it. The cause of human rights, with its many faces, has depended heavily on students.

There exists a real irony in the midst of campus activism. Side by side with powerful movements of social reform can be found a massive pall of "it canít be done" and "nothing matters." Nor am I describing two different sets of students. Often those who have committed their lives to social reform are convinced that they will ultimately fail. According to a left-wing point of view, the entrenched forces of the military-industrial complex will ultimately crush all who get in their way. All one can hope to do is make a noble gesture, perhaps a mighty one, but ultimately it will not change things.

As I have spoken to older groups about world hunger, Iíve heard many of the same explanations college students give, reinforced by the fact that older people have a longer history of not feeling they make a difference. I ran smack into this in my very first presentation on world hunger in Honolulu.

Shortly after I returned to Honolulu from the est Advisory Board meeting, my mother invited me to speak to her Senior Citizens Club. She was the program chairman and she was delighted to have an excuse to show off her son. So we arranged for me to come to the club one noon to tell them about world hunger, The Hunger Project, and what the club members could do to end starvation in the world.

My main presentation went very well. Iíd been introduced and presented with a lei. I told them the main facts about hunger, emphasizing that it could be ended. I suggested various things they might do to fight hunger, and I told them about a Hunger Project event that was coming soon, with a six-dollar admission fee.

One of the ladies in the club asked a question. "How can I be sure this is real?"

"Excuse me?"

"How can I be sure that this really is what you say it is? I sent money to Boysí Town for years. I sent five dollars every month, even when it was really hard for me to scrape together the money. Any time I would think ëMaybe I wonít send it this month,í Iíd think about those poor orphans who needed it more than me."

She swallowed and continued her story. "Then one day I read in the paper that Boysí Town had millions of dollars in the bank." Her eyes scanned the room. "I felt stupid for scraping together five dollars every month when they had more money than I will ever see."

Now her eyes finally came to rest on me. "I feel really bad about the people who are starving, and I want to help, but how can I be sure this isnít something else Iíll feel stupid about later?"

It was one of those situations you appreciate in retrospect, an opportunity for learningónot unlike learning to swim by falling into the ocean. There I stood, in front of my mother and her friends, asked a powerful question I couldnít answer.

While the gears of my mind whirred around and around in search of an answer, I heard myself answering. "You canít be sure, really. If you pay six dollars to come to the presentation I mentioned, or if you give money to some other organization to fight hunger, thereís no way you can be absolutely certain you wonít feel conned later on. Iím afraid thatís an unavoidable risk of trying to make a difference. Ultimately, I guess, you have to weigh how much you want to end hunger against how much you donít want to look stupid."

Instead of me answering her question, it was as though someone else were answering mine. All this time, I had been worried about the possibility of looking stupid because of my participation in The Hunger Project. Now I saw that I very well might look stupid. That was the price of trying to make a difference in the world. Oh. Somehow, knowing that was very liberating for me.

The differences Iíve observed in speaking about hunger to a spectrum of age groups are similar to the process of growing up Iíve experienced personally, and I suspect the same may be true for you as well. As a young child and continuing up to high school, I was unabashedly committed to making the world better. When I saw things that just werenít the way they were supposed to be, I tended to leap into action. Then, somewhere during high school and college, I underwent a subtle shift in the way I approached life. I learned that I was powerless to do anything about the way things were. So, I pretty much gave up trying. My own experience with The Hunger Project and with my study of heroism more generally has recreated in me the possibility of making a difference. The willingness to step out and take a chance has been rekindled as well.

My own experience in this regard has not been unique. During the past few years, the issue of world hungeróboth within The Hunger Project and outside itóhas sparked true heroism in individuals again and again. The total, personal commitment which seems needed to cause an ideaís time to come is alive and growing in the war against hunger, and it is my privilege to report some examples of that in concluding this chapter.

Individuals in Action

Joan Holmes is an excellent first example of an individual taking responsibility for world hunger. When Erhard announced his commitment to ending hunger, Holmes gave up a successful career as a school psychologist and volunteered to be responsible for bringing the project into existence as interim manager.

While Hunger Project founders Erhard, Denver, and Fuller initially looked for a nationally prominent person to take the position of executive director, things turned out rather differently. Within a few months, it became clear to them that Joan Holmes was exactly the person for the job. She had demonstrated repeatedly her fundamental grasp of the generating principles of The Hunger Project and what it would take to put them into action.

For Holmesís part, becoming executive director of The Hunger Project meant creating a twenty-year, personal commitment to the end of hunger. Itís worth noting that nothing in her previous career pointed logically toward her new job. Nor was there any guarantee that her decision would prove a wise one. No one expected Holmes to take on the end of hunger. The world was not clamoring for The Hunger Project. In short, nothing reasonable pointed toward the dramatic shift in her life. Joan Holmes became personally responsible for the end of world hunger in the same way Martin Luther King, Jr., became responsible for civil rights and Ralph Nader became responsible for consumersí rights: because she said so.

By the fall of 1983, Joan Holmes had become successful by any measure. The Hunger Project had become respected throughout the hunger-response community. With 2.6 million individuals having enrolled themselves in the project, and in the cause of the end of world hunger, The Hunger Project was the largest private voluntary organization in the world. Holmes was now accustomed to meeting with leading scientists and heads of state around the world. From an ordinary human point of view, Joan Holmes had taken a chance but made good on it. Now, she could sit back and enjoy the life of a prestigious international leader.

By fall 1983, however, Joan Holmes had concluded that the time had come for The Hunger Project to move into the trenches and challenge hunger face-to-face. Having developed a powerful and well-trained staff in San Francisco, Holmes now created a three-person executive body to run the San Francisco office, and she moved to Bombay to establish The Hunger Project in India.

It is estimated that one-third of all the worldís hungry people live in India. The second most populous country in the world, India is divided by language, religion, ethnicity, politics, class, and caste. More recovery and development programs have failed in India than in any other country. In short, all the circumstances argue against The Hunger Project having any impact in India.

In Holmesís view, her mission is not to "take The Hunger Project to India" but to provide an opportunity for it to arise among the Indian people. Rather than pity, she bring with her a respect for the ability of individual Indians to take on the problem of hunger and end it, and she is personally committed to forming a partnership with them in that. So all the circumstances are against the success of the partnership? Holmes replies: "An individualís word is more powerful than circumstances."

In 1979, Monique Grodzki was a nine-year-old growing up in suburban New York when she happened to see a television documentary on the plight of Cambodian refugees. While moved by the tragedy of it all, Monique was more powerfully struck by the peopleís undaunted spirit. " I found it amazing that they were still singing and had the hope and strength to go on. After I saw that, I actually cried. I really had to do something about it."

Monique was also moved by the discovery that children suffer most from hunger and from war. In her view, children should have a say about wars, about government: "They should have a say about things in general, about things that affect them." Monique resolved to give children a say in establishing the priorities of the world. "Weíre putting millions and billions of dollars into nuclear armaments. Wouldnít it be better to have a ëstop world hungerí race than a nuclear armament race?"

The Childrenís Peace Committee was the result of Moniqueís resolve: its purpose to "help abolish world hunger and promote world peace." By 1982, a growing membership of two hundred children aged ten to thirteen were actively engaged in a variety of activities. Theyíve addressed the general public at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza of the United Nations, circulated petitions, collected money and sent it to organizations fighting hunger in the field. Looking closer to home, they raised money to buy bullet-proof vests for police officers in New York, and contributed to the family of an officer killed in the line of duty. More important than the specific activities of Monique and her friends is the simple fact of their willingness to take responsibility for something much bigger than anyone would expect a to comprehend. If nothing else, it makes it that much harder for adults to feel too small to make a difference.

Leonard Solomon, president of Budget Rent-A-Car in Miami, found that one way to bring public attention to the problem of world hunger was to put Hunger Project bumper stickers on all the Budget cars in Southern Florida and New Orleans. But it didnít stop there. Solomon was an avid tennis player. Working hard with his son Harold, a professional tennis player, he organized a series of annual tennis benefits on behalf of the fight against hunger. In 1983, it was my privilege to watch the likes of Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe play tennis, and to accept a check for forty thousand dollars toward the elimination of hunger in the world. Through their commitment and imagination, Lenny and Harold Solomon have made it possible for people to end hunger by playing tennis.

Valerie Harper, Emmy winner for her leading role in the "Rhoda" television series, was one of those attending the March 1977 meeting in which Werner Erhard introduced the Hunger Project. Since then, she has used her public recognition as a vehicle for drawing public attention to the issue of world hunger. In 1980, Harper joined a delegation visiting Somalia at the height of a hunger crisis brought on by drought and an unending war between Somalia and Ethiopia over the contested Ogaden region. Returning to the United States, she addressed the House of Representatives and raised the issue of hunger in East Africa in discussions with countless government officials.

One of the most moving stories from the 1980 trip to Somalia is told by Father Miles Riley, a Roman Catholic priest on the staff of the San Francisco diocese. Riley went to Somalia to find out what the church might do to aid the refugees.

In the course of touring a crowded, dusty refugee camp near the Ethiopian border, Riley was led inside a tiny dark hut. Going from the bright sunshine outside, Riley was at first blind and could only sense a mass of bodies surrounding him. As his vision gradually returned, he found himself in the midst of several mothers, clutching listless, skin-and-bones babies as though hoping their love could take the place of medicine and food.

By the time he could see fully, Riley found himself the focus of all attention in the hut. Was he a doctor? Had he come to save their babies? One desperate mother struggled to her feet and thrust her baby at the priest, saying something Riley couldnít understand.

After devoting his adult life to serving others, the priest took the fragile infant in his arms and found himself crushed by the realization that he had nothing to give. "I wasnít a doctor," he explained. "I had no medicine to administer. I had no food to give." Then his priestly instincts came alive. "Iím often called to minister spiritually to the sick and the dying, and I thought perhaps I should bless the child. But then, I realized that all these people were Moslems." From their point of view, his priestly contribution would be of no value.

The language barrier prevented the priest from even offering words of hope or comfort. He couldnít explain that he was on a fact-finding mission or that he would work for Somalian relief when he returned to the United States. Stripped of all his conventional tools for contributing, Riley found an answer at a more basic human level. "Without thinking, I kissed the baby with all the love and compassion I was feeling right then and gave it back to its mother. Her face burst into the biggest smile you can imagine, and she held her baby up for everyone to see."

As I mentioned earlier, John Denver was one of the three principal founders of The Hunger Project in 1977. Since then he has continued to look for ways of making his personal contribution to the end of hunger. It was not surprising, perhaps, that he would write a song, " I Want to Live," to draw popular attention to the problem in a way that showed the human dignity of the hungry rather than holding them up as objects of pity.

Going beyond the obvious, Denver produced a movie on world hunger for use in schools. In large part, the purpose of the film was to eradicate some of the mythology surrounding the problem. As the film documents, hunger persists, it doesnít have to, and individuals will make the difference in ending it.

Denver was also active in bringing the issue of world hunger to the attention of the Carter administration. Later, he served on Carterís Presidential Commission on World and Domestic Hunger.

For Pam Jeffcock of Columbia Falls, Montana, the commitment to end world hunger took the form of a county-wide food bank. In addition, she was responsible for the creation of a public service announcement to bring the message of ending world hunger to Montana television viewers three times a day. She reports, "The focus of my life has changed. It is something much bigger than myself."

When country singer and composer Kenny Rogers and wife Marianne decided to strike a blow against world hunger, they looked for some way to leverage their contribution. Thus, they donated a million dollars to create "The World Hunger Awards" to acknowledge the efforts of members of the mass media who draw public attention to the issue of world hunger. Roger explains:

Marianne and I felt that although one million dollars is a substantial sum of money, it would have little impact by itself on world hunger. We found that recent reports pin-point 

Marguerite Chandler is a New Jersey wife and mother of two teenage boys. Once she became aware of the problem of world hunger through The Hunger Project, she began looking to see if there was any way an "average" person could make a difference. Here are a few of the answers she found for herself in the first two years of her commitment:

• She founded a county-wide Food Bank Network to coordinate the efforts of the various county agencies involved in feeding people.
• She has worked with state and county penal systems to give convicts an opportunity to assist in food distribution. 
• She is creating an Aid to Friends program to provide volunteers to assist the handicapped and elderly in preparing their meals.
• She has worked with local athletic teams to coordinate food drives with games. Five tons of food were collected at one game, for example.
• She is coordinating a planning committee for a state-wide conference dedicated to ending hunger in New Jersey. 
• She has written and recorded Public Service Announcements and distributed them to over six hundred radio stations across the country.
• She organized a three-week exhibit on ending hunger for the state capitol building and arranged to have leading public officials photographed at the exhibit.
• She subscribes to a clipping service in order to keep track of articles on hunger in the media; she then redistributes the clippings to other individuals and organizations.

Raul Julia, an actor appearing frequently in movies and on television, is best known as a star of numerous Broadway productions. Concerned with the problem of world hunger, Julia has found numerous ways of pursuing that concern. As one example, theater-goers attending Juliaís performances find a surprise in their theater programs. The listing of Juliaís theater credits concludes with a lengthy discussion of the problem of world hunger and suggests ways people can contribute to its solution.

When Pittsburgh Pirates baseball star Willie Stargell became aware of the problem of hunger, he announced he would find some way of making a special contribution. Later, when he was to be honored for his career in baseball, he asked his Pittsburgh fans to bring cans of food to the stadium for distribution to local food banks.

Happily, the list could go on and on, and it grows daily as more and more individuals find ways of taking personal responsibility for the problem of world hunger. I confess a reluctance to stop this reporting, since it means overlooking hundreds and hundreds of genuine heroes.

No one was ever more concerned about world hunger or looked harder to find what he could do than composer-singer Harry Chapin. Throughout the 1960s, Harry devoted himself to a variety of social causes, but he eventually came to the conclusion that there was no greater injustice in the world than could be found in the cases of the hundreds of millions of human beings who went to bed hungry night after night. In1975, he joined with Father Bill Ayres to form World Hunger Year, an organization dedicated to "give constant and consistent exposure to the hunger problem." From then on, he was to dedicate his professional and personal life to that issue. A substantial proportion of every concert season thereafter was devoted specifically to ending hunger, and Chapin never gave a concert that didnít draw peoplesí attention to the problem.

When President Carter appointed a Commission on World and Domestic Hunger, Chapin was an obvious choice as a commissioner. Many observers felt that Chapin was the primary force in getting the commission created in the first place, and he brought a powerful commitment and sense of urgency to the commissionís deliberations.

Harry Chapin ran his life according to the following principles, which should serve as an undying legacy for us all:

• When in doubtÖdo something.
• Iíd rather be wrong than be frightened.
• The key to my life is that Iím willing to make an ass of myself.