EMPATHY IS A CHOICE - ENTER ROTARY

It has been said that one death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic. We appear to have the ability to empathize with individual tragedies. However, when confronting large numbers of suffering people, as in epidemics, earthquakes or genocides we often choose to react less empathetically.

Enter service clubs like Rotary. Service clubs have the ability to harness our collective empathy, and through their size essentially reduce the apparent enormity of overwhelming odds to manageable proportions.

Consider that at this point in time there are 60 million refugees world-wide. 14,000 People die from diseases related to contaminated water - EVERY DAY. 18,000 Kids die from hunger and malnutrition  - EVERY DAY. That is 1.5 million a year. 700 Million people live with disabilities. 20% of the world's poorest people have some kind of disability. 775 Million can't read - 66% of these are women. 32 Million live in the United States.

It is very easy to become overwhelmed by these statistics, throw up your hands, and do nothing. But here comes the strength of service clubs like Rotary. With 35,000 clubs and 1.2 million committed, compassionate members, rotarians are able to make a difference. Rotarians are able to pool the assets everyone brings to the table and effect greater impact.

Back in the 1950s over 55,000 new polio cases developed in the United States. Every year 50,000 plus kids died from polio, and thousands more were crippled, paralyzed or suffered lifeling disabilities. Rotary began to undertake an eradication effort 25 years ago. At the time the estimate was that the project would cost $100 million dollars, and  500 million kids needed to be immunized. Initially the organization set a fundraising goal of $120 million. Two years later, in 1987, that goal was surpassed, with $240 million raised. Rotary linked up with the World Health Organization, and in 1988 the inoculation program was well under way. At that time you would find polio in 125 nations, and every year  350,000 new cases broke out. Since that time, with financial help from the Gates Foundation, over 2 billion children have received Rotary's polio vaccine. They are now living a life without the fear of paralysis and death from polio. In fact only three countries still report new polio cases - Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. The rest of the world is polio free. What once was an overwhelming statistic was reduced to manageable levels, harnessing our collective empathy and affecting the lives of real people.

Rotary has many stories like this. Individual clubs choose objectives they can confront within their own means. As an example, consider the Rotary Club of Watsonville, California. During its last fiscal year the club produced sufficient funds to give 15,000 kids the opportunity to live polio free; install a water purification system in San Lucas, Guatemala, where, up to that point one third of children under sixteen  died from diseases related to polluted water sources; support a health initiative in a remote area of India giving hundreds of families a chance for a better life, and locally the club spent close to $100,000 on scholarships, infrastructure improvements in schools, literacy programs and support for organizations like Boy Scouts, Papas, the Pajama Project and others.

Multiply this effort by 35,000 clubs, and the potential is enormous. Service clubs like Rotary allow us to show empathy and make a difference in the lives of people who, most often of  no fault of their own, are suffering from the many inequities of every day lives in many parts of the world. Without these   clubs many of these people just become statistics.