Doing One's Part

If you own a $2000 purse, you're not doing enough.

I say this as much in judgment of myself as I do of anyone who actually owns such a purse. The statement came from the second time I saw New York City for the first time.
As my father drove me home from the airport after I had spent a semester at an orphanage in Africa, I was transported back to the first time I had driven through those streets. Only this time I was thinking very different thoughts than I was when my father drove his star-struck fifteen-year-old into New York City for her big summer away from home. I remember looking out of the window at the stores on Fifth Avenue and feeling I had finally found where I belonged. Here was the home of those amazing clothes, those designer purses, those mysterious and alluring sunglasses. That first summer in The City I had wanted desperately to fit in. Over the years I've welcomed each new opportunity to spend even a fraction of the money that will get me closer to looking New-York perfect.
Now, as I pass those same stores, I don't see perfection, I see waste. I see selfishness. I saw a mass of people – any one of whom could have saved an orphan like Kojo or Isaac. Kojo has a brian tumor. The doctors in Africa gave him a year to live because they couldn't perform the operation he needed. Only adoption by someone in Great Britain or the United States, where the operation was done, could have saved him. Over the past months I've watched him deteriorate to the point where no doctor in the world could do him any good. Isaac has HIV. Without money for the medical care necessary to keep him alive, Isaac is destined to become another statistic, dead before the age of five. Right now he's toddling around the orphanage and charming everyone who visits, but who knows how long he'll last?
My father understood that I was grieving – reacting to a side of life most New Yorkers never see. And he made a good point – most of the people I saw do contribute to charities. They just don't contribute to the people I had grown to love. We can't save the whole world, he reminded me, we each do our part. And it's not wrong to enjoy the fruits of our labor as well, is it?
Then it hit me. Since when has my father brought me up to be “good enough?” Since when have my grades been “good enough?” Since when has my performance at my job been “good enough?” Come to think of it, I was actually raised to do everything I could do, and if that wasn't enough, to do a little more. I was raised to believe that in this world, bosses don't want someone who “tries.” Successful people aren't the ones who “get a little closer” to their goal. In fact, great Biblical heros like Abraham and Paul didn't really seem interested in “doing enough” either. Where did this apathetic thinking come from?
I think I know.
The problem is that people view need like they view the continent of Africa itself – as a massive, unsolvable problem. And they contribute into that ambiguous “need,” which is all that anyone could expect them to do. But when I think of need I think of Kojo. I think of Isaac. Needs have names, and someone's “good enough” wasn't enough for them.