Fighting the wrong fight?

A French philosopher once wrote: “There is nothing more dangerous than courageous stupidity”. With this in mind, I would follow up by saying: “The greatest waste of time and resources is to fight the wrong fight”.

Once upon a time I was working hand in hand with a very dedicated and passionate Social Action person who has given her life to social action and helping the poor. Through the years I’ve admired her and tried to support or work with her whenever possible. Whether I agreed or not with her “politics” was immaterial because we agreed in her religion of compassion and charity.

Once in a while I would raise an eyebrow at her hardline stance on politics and business, and issues such as mining. From time to time I would nod in agreement in our shared views on the environment, religion and common sense. Then one day we had a chance to talk about her concerns about mining, local government and social action which seem to take up a lot of her time and strength. For some reason, I was unusually reflective that day and I found myself asking her a simple but deeply honest question.

“If we set aside the politics, religion and social issues, what is our single greatest concern as individuals, as government and as GOD’s people?”

As we attempted to answer the question, I could practically see ourselves going through the “Onion peel” experience of trying to distinguish what is superficial from what is real. Yes, we don’t like corrupt politicians, but corruption and politics is not “our” exclusive concern or original agenda. Let the leftists and the media handle that. Then we talked about social injustice and agreed that social injustice was the concern of government and not “ours”. Big concepts and big problems need big government to come up with national solutions. Citizens can only address what is in their neighborhood.

Then we talked about environmental concerns that seemed to find its way in many of her dialogues. Yes the environment is on everybody’s agenda but we also realized that “environmental issues” seems to have taken over a more important matter far closer to her heart even in her younger days. It did not take long before we had tied down the real concern, which was to help the poor that had names, faces and physical bodies within her community.

Whenever a company or business executive asks me to help solve corporate problems or concerns, I always insist on doing the onion peel exercise where managers or decision makers are required to strip a problem layer by layer. This helps enormously in simplifying problems, identifies the real threat or concern and ultimately pinpoints who and how the organization got derailed or distracted. A close cousin to the onion peel is an actual inventory or quantitative study of plans versus actions. We can all talk about what we want to do, but more often than not, we discover hardly anything has been done. In simple terms, everybody has the MAC, the Blackberry, the Ipad etc. but everyone always forgets to write down their “To do list” on a pad paper and actually sticks to getting things done.

Even worse, many of us don’t have an “Accountability Officer” empowered to drill & grill us concerning our action plans. Too often we are answerable only to ourselves, and that is why it takes months if not years before people and corporations realize they’re lost. Like it or not, the wife or the friend who tells us to ask for directions is actually preventing us from getting miserably lost.

When I asked my friend exactly how much time, how much money and how much work actually went into directly addressing the poverty and the needs of poor people around her, it was as if I had poured a bucket of ice water on all her misdirected and misleading passions. After spending nearly 3 decades fighting different battles and different wars, it became clear that she, like many others, had been distracted from her primary objective, which was to help the poor. Instead of spending 100% of her resources in directly addressing the needs of the poor, she was effectively giving only 25% or less because the rest was spread out Talking about their causes, fighting mining companies, arguing with corrupt or inept government officials, campaigning on political issues and lambasting their natural enemies.

Yes, someone needs to take a stand against most if not all of the above, but if we cannot even claim victory or excellence in our own battlefields what business is it of ours to pick another fight or spread ourselves thin? I wonder what the results would be if we all did a cold and indifferent inventory of how much real help actually goes to the poor through our campaigns and our causes? When we talked about it, my friend could not deny that no immediate and long lasting help really reached the poor people in her community because of their multi-front battles.

In a place where land was cheap and could be bought and distributed, it never occurred to them to buy land for the landless. Given the small size or number of families in rural areas, it would have been relatively cheap and easy to give or build homes for each poor family. But there being no land how could they build homes. A tree cannot bear fruit if it has no place to grow roots. I guess this is why organizations such as Gawad Kalinga and Habitat for Humanity are quite successful. All their activities and programs are anchored on one single goal: to build homes. Every other achievement they have in terms of community development is the result of the singular goodwill from building a house.

Whether we want to rescue people from calamity or from poverty it helps to remember what soldiers, firemen, or rescue personnel always say: “We do it one person at a time”. We do it by having single-minded purpose and as fighter pilots always say: “Locked on Target”.