Variations on a theme by South African Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer.
Inspired, plagiarized and paraphrased from her novel “A Sport of Nature”, Penguin Books, N.Y. 1988.
I am not lonely. But in my darkest hours, feel I am alone.
In development work, living without a cause is living without a reason to be. As opposed to those who do not, those of us who have choices ought to have morals. How often are we caught in the thought that we know what is right, even if we do not manage to do it? Many of us spend our professional lives living in the midst of inequities and behave as decently as we can -under the circumstances. We can spend our lives on our front porches and never be of real use to anyone, especially if we uncritically listen to all the dis-information floating around about development, justice, rights and equity. We can indeed choose to continue to live on “innocence and ice-cream”. But is that ethical?
We cannot just be grounded on remembering how good it used to be; instead, we need to embark in providing a new style of leadership (more and more based on the inalienable principles of Human Rights). We need to be taken out of the ranks of ‘useful onlookers’ and become grassroots protagonists. We say we have been preparing for change. That is all right. But have we really worked for change that is meaningful to those we purport to serve?
The much taunted freedoms of assembly, speech and the press are not the only ones that count. Freedom is divisible. Most of us want life for the poor people to be better. That is a freedom too! I still prefer the way freedom is divided here (in Viet Nam, for example) over the way it is divided in the great riches of the West.
Some choose to fight through charity (or God). This comes about, in part because we do not know why we are in this world…and religions tell us why. Others decide to go fight with the people -not through God. (For me, in the real world, God changes sides too often). To one of Gordimer’s characters it was not the Church, but Marx who told him what the world was really about.
Donors send soup powder to change the world. In the meantime, some get power. The important thing is to be on the side that gets the power…you will never come to power on soup powder. And you have to be in power to be able to feed your own people. You get there with power (people’s power) and you stay there with money. (In the process of negotiating to get there, it is not questions of justice and reason that count; it boils down to the question of sheer power). Justice is high-minded and relative. We can give people justice or withhold it. But power, they find out how to take it for themselves; through circumstances that arise pragmatically from the specific circumstances of their lives. That is why textbook revolutions fail. Therefore, is it our role to help create those circumstances?
But even under these prerogatives, if we do not attempt to do justice, we cut morality out of power. And that is dangerous.
We can go away from what is happening now. But we can never go away from our moral responsibility.
We need to be fully engaged with the world and the present, based on a concrete historical past.
Then there is no need for too much reflection.
The past becomes a preparation to put action in motion.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
schuftan@gmail.com