Yesterday’s Oregonian featured on the front page a story entitled “An Overwhelming Gift of Love.”  The story recounted the fundraising efforts of Molalla and Mulino students for the “Share the Love” program.  The students pick needy recipients, and in past years have raised over $37,0000.  They have given $1,750 for a middle schooler’s kidney transplant; $3,200 for a former Molalla High student’s cancer treatments; $12,000 for grandparents in retirement raising their grandchildren.

Joe Zenisek, a science teacher who started Share the Love, says “people are communal creatures hard-wired to feel empathy for one another.”  He believes that Share the Love has proven him right.

I’m not so sure.  I recently saw the documentary “Reporter” about the work of journalist Nicholas Kristof, who travels the world, calling readers’ attention to injustice and desperate human need.  In the film he explains that when he writes a story, he has to find one person, a person, who is a symbol for the generalization he wishes to make in his story–because readers just don’t respond compassionately to statistics. 

So in the film, Kristof goes to the Congo and searches for his one victim, and finally finds her, one among the hundreds of thousands of people murdered by warring factions in the Congo.  The camera shows a young woman, all skin and bones, with a large bleeding sore that has become infected.  She was once doing fine–had some land and a few animals–but soldiers raped her, and so no man would marry her, and no one was left to care for her, so she had been deserted in the jungle and was dying.  Kristof writes about her. 

He explains to the camera: studies reveal that if you show people a picture of one starving child, they are empathetic; if you show them two starving children, the level of empathy goes way down.  And the amount of empathy continues to go down in relation to the number of victims affected.  He is saddened that readers will not respond if he gives them horrendous statistics–say 50,000 women have been raped–but he recognizes that he must get the big picture to people through the specifics.  Kristof is not chiefly about empathy–he is about policy change.

So what are these high schoolers learning?  They are surely learning that they can make a difference in someone else’s life when they work together on a project.  They are learning that it feels good to give.  And that’s OK.  But I’m hoping that somewhere along the way in their growing up, they begin to ask hard questions like, “Why don’t these children have medical care?” and “Why do elderly grandparents have to depend on high school fundraisers in order to feed their grandchildren?”  I hope they are learning that empathy and love are not just sweet words that can be simply translated into Thanksgiving baskets and Christmas Toys for Tots. 

As one of my activist friends wrote, “Justice is love in action.”  And action for a grown-up means looking at the big picture and becoming politically active and trying to change the policies that cause and support human suffering.  No, we’re not hard-wired to care about statistics.  But as we mature in our spiritual and civic lives, we will go beyond where our heart strings pull us, and head off suffering and injustice at the pass.