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Frank Deaver Peace Editorials

 
World Understanding Starts At Home
By Frank Deaver
Rotary Club of Tuscaloosa, Alabama USA



Our world is full of minorities. There are racial and ethnic minorities, there are religious minorities, there are political minorities, and many more.

Rotarians also constitute a minority. Of the more than six billion people in the world, our number is only a little more than 1.2 million.

What makes Rotarians different is that we are a distinctly privileged minority. Most Rotarians are among the one percent of people in the world who have a college education or who own a computer. In our comfortable homes, we are far richer than the 80 percent who live in substandard housing. With food enough to eat, we are healthier than the 50 percent who suffer from malnutrition. With the ability to read and write, we are more employable than the 70 percent who are illiterate.

We are all too often the victims of a lack of understanding, or perhaps more accurately, of misunderstanding. We give to the Rotary Foundation, but we are only minimally aware of how our contributions are spent. We speak of Rotary's humanitarian programs, but we know too little about the plight of the recipients.

The life of a Rotarian is in many ways too comfortable. Too few of us have had opportunity to personally witness the poverty and misery of the world's majority. Perhaps we have not even been exposed to the homeless, the illiterate, the oppressed, within our own communities. Perhaps our daily commute from comfortable home to comfortable office fails to take us through "that part of town."

In truth, we need not look to distant lands to find the minority among us, the unfortunate ones who lack even the basic necessities of life. They are virtually on our doorsteps, and the fact that they so often remain invisible is as much our fault as theirs.

This month, dedicated to World Understanding, offers to Rotarians a challenge to introduce one minority (ours) to other minorities (those who are in need). What we may come to understand is that there is more opportunity for service in our own communities than we realized. A startling example is in a county in the United States, claiming to have a higher percentage of PhD's in its population than any other county in the country. On the other hand, that county has 26 percent illiteracy.

Rotarians in that county, and in every community throughout the Rotary world, could embrace the philosophy of Stephen Grellet, French-American advocate for reforms in hospital and prison conditions:

"I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good things, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show a fellow being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."

World understanding is a noble and worthy Rotary goal, but it does not begin on the other side of the world. It begins where we are. It begins at our very doorstep.
RGHF Committee Editorial Writer Frank Deaver,    23 August 2007