Getting a Grip 2 by Frances Moore Lappé (Excerpt)

Poverty, hunger, inequality, climate change, war, disease–why are we creating a world that no one wants? Because our ideas about the world and how it works are wrong, says Frances Moore Lappé. And if we want to change direction–and we can–we have to change the way we think. Lappé’s new book Getting a Grip 2 (excerpted below) explains how.

Getting a Grip2: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage for the World We Really Want

By Frances Moore Lappé

Opening Note

It’s Thanksgiving Morning and I’m sitting at the kitchen table. This afternoon, thirty-three members of our extended family will arrive for dinner, and for hours afterward we’ll circle in the living room, singing and laughing. Never has it felt easier than right now to count my personal blessings–finding the love of my life is but one on a long, long list.

I’d planned to start chopping the veggies, but instead I just sit. My mind moves to the arc of the decade now ending, and I feel a sharp sensation. Tears well up.

Not in despair. Not in joy. No, I realize it’s an awareness of the huge gap that’s getting to me.

The gap?

I’ll try to explain. In 1970, looking out on the San Francisco Bay as I pounded away at the typewriter to compose Diet for a Small Planet, I’d just been jolted into action by a basic fact: Hundreds of millions of people were going hungry, yet world harvests were more than enough to feed us all well.

Now, as I begin this book four decades later, I realize that in just a few years the number of hungry people worldwide has grown by almost a fifth to over a billion–now well exceeding what had so disturbed me as a young woman. Yet, production has more than kept pace with our growing population. Since I began counting, agricultural output per person has climbed by 20 percent. And while the decade in which I wrote my first book, the sixties, saw the US poverty rate slashed in half, in the decade just ending the number of poor people grew each year by an average of one million [ital], hitting a record high. In 2008, the number of Americans so poor that even getting enough food to eat is a problem had, in just one year, climbed by a third.

My unexpected emotion is a response, I realize, not only to these giant steps in the wrong direction, but to the huge gap between what we, humanity, now know about what works–and is working in so many places–and what we’re doing that’s not working.

I get up from the table and start chopping.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Despite my tears on a happy day, I’m not bewildered or overwhelmed by our world gone mad. I’m ready. I’m past ready. I just want to go for it. Why can’t we have a nation–why can’t we have a world–we’re proud of? Why can’t we stop wringing our hands over poverty, hunger, species decimation, genocide, and death from curable disease that we know is all needless?

I now see there’s no reason we can’t.

They say–whoever “they” are–that as we age, we mellow. I don’t think so. I’m getting less and less patient.

Frances Moore Lappé

Why? Because I realize that humanity has no excuses anymore. In my own lifetime, both historical evidence and breakthroughs in knowledge have wiped out all our excuses. We know how to end this needless suffering, and we have all the resources to do it. From sociology and anthropology to economics, from education and ecology to systems analysis, the evidence is in. We know what works.

Both “soft” psychology and “hard” neuroscience confirm that we humans come equipped with a moral compass–with deep needs and sensibilities that make us yearn to end the suffering. Yet we deny these feelings every single day at huge cost to our society and our world.

No physical obstacle is stopping us. Nothing. The barrier is in our heads. We are creating this world gone mad, not because we’re compelled to by some deep flaws in our nature and not because Nature itself is stingy and unforgiving, but because of ideas we hold.

Ideas?

Yes. This is one of the most startling discoveries–awakenings–of the last century: Human beings are in fact creatures of the mind. Our ideas about reality determine what we see, what we believe, and therefore what we become. And we also now know that human beings can change our big, life-shaping ideas, even our ideas of democracy, of power, of fear, and–yes–of evil itself.

As we do, we no longer have to settle for grasping at straws–wild acts of protest, or tearful acts of charity, or any other short-term, feel-less-bad steps. We become open to the possibility of real change. And, when you think about it, how could we ever believe the world can change unless we experience ourselves changing?

So this is what getting a grip means to me. It means learning to see the killer ideas that trap us and letting them go. It means people of all walks of life interrupting the spiral of despair and reversing it with new ideas, ingenious innovation, and courage. It means finding that mixture of anger and hope to energize us for this do-or-die effort. Why not go for it?

Frances Moore Lappe
Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 2010

Tagged as: Excerpts