Shoes

At times like these, there are all sorts of people ready to solve the world's problems. It often involves rushing from here to there, imposing some solution they have carried there with them from outside the arena where the problem has arisen.  Whether it's the economy of Greece, the banking crisis on Wall St., the uprising in Syria, disease in the poorest countries of Africa, whatever.... there is some determined soul who has a plan about "what they really oughta wanna do."  Usually, it involves a plan for somebody else to do something.  After all, what people really oughta wanna do is not what the are actually doing, but what someone else believes they should be doing.  

Only rarely does someone propose a solution that begins with their own selves and what that someone him or herself can do.  In such cases, their solution lacks the dramatic, immediate quality that people go for.  They are more often just plodding along, doing what needs to be done a step at a time, a day at a time.  Some years ago, I picked up a book called Small Is Beautiful.  It was about the changes being wrought in East Asia and Africa by micro-lending and micro-businesses.  The movement, which still exists in many forms, was empowering people a handful at a time, and making steady, albeit slow, progress in allowing people to successfully leave poverty.  I have to do some research to see if the ideas have taken hold and maintained their slow but steady momentum.  I hope they have.  

In the years that have passed since that book was published, trillions of dollars have been spent from external sources trying to create jobs and economic growth on a large scale.   As far as I know, those trillions have not succeeded in causing improvement in the lot of those whose lives they intended to improve.  

The solutions seem to reflect the ages old dichotomy--there's me, and and then there's the rest of the world.  The rest of the world should do this or that (whatever the proposed solution is), and I don't really have to do anything.  It reminded me of something I heard recently, "some people try to protect their feet (themselves) from the world by covering the world with leather, others just put on shoes."  Let's try the shoes.