As much of the world celebrates Christmas and prepares to enter a brand new year, the globe is still wracked by death and misery.
Once again, technological marvels of missile science have rained down on Iraq, where millions live in fear of an insane dictator. Dozens of civil wars fester, from Yugoslavia to Ceylon. Terrorist acts know no boundaries. Every week seems to bring news of another massacre.
Disease continues to ravage Africa. Hundreds of millions of human beings suffer from starvation and malnutrition. Even comparatively wealthy Canada has poverty, malnutrition, AIDs and increasingly vicious crimes.
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Thankfully, the large majority of Canadians are free from such extreme suffering. But the relentless push of global economic forces has brought severe strain into many families, especially farm families.
There does not seem much to celebrate in all that, nor much motivation to go around cheerily wishing people a happy holiday season.
But there are those who choose not to focus on the selfishness and wickedness of which humanity is so eminently capable. Instead, they concentrate on the good that humans are equally capable of achieving.
Fom Asian leper colonies to America’s urban ghettos, volunteers work to help society’s rejects. For them, charity is a year-round calling, not just a Christmas donation to a Salvation Army soup kettle.
Among the millions of other examples of people helping people are the projects where Canadian co-operatives aid formation of grassroots consumer and producer co-ops in developing countries. Each small-scale co-op is insignificant in global economic statistics, but it can transform its local community for the better.
And then there are cases like the three high-school students in Prince Edward Island who were studying marketing and ethics. Deciding to do something in response to the farm crisis, they raised money to buy hogs from local farmers at $100 each, more than the local market rate. Processors donated their time, and the meat was distributed to needy families.
At last report, they had been able to buy a dozen hogs for that project.
That’s statistically insignificant compared with the millions of hogs being produced annually.
But they showed that they cared, and they did what they could to help. If enough people do the same, the world can continue to slowly become a better place. And if one looks in the right places, one can still find cause for the hope and joy symbolized by the star that once shone over Bethlehem.
