starfish revisited

Children at St. Maria Orphanage, Magada, Uganda

The following is an entry (and a follow-up comment) from a volunteer-abroad website, Volunteerlogue.com, with which I have recently become acquainted. The writer is Katie. As you may recall, I talked about the Starfish Theory in a previous post (February 21).

“The Starfish Theory is a nice story and has an important message: you can’t do everything, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do what you can. Or, what you do, even if it only helps one person, makes a world of difference to that person.

To me, the danger of using this story too often is this: what if there were a way to stop all those starfish from ending up on the beach in the first place, but it meant that all of us would have to make some sacrifice or accept a change we might not like, and we wouldn’t get to pat ourselves on the back for throwing them back?

What if people who didn’t mind the starfish but didn’t really care all that much and certainly didn’t want to make any sacrifices on their own were able to avoid making those bigger changes by saying, 'Look at those people throwing the starfish back – see? Something is being done. We don’t need to make any changes. There are these marvelous humanitarians already on it. The problem will be solved in no time, so we can relax.'

Is there really a solution to stop starfish from washing up on the shore? I think not (though who knows, I could be wrong). Are there possibly solutions to human problems which require major changes and involve others making sacrifices, which people may avoid by citing humanitarian projects? I would say probably yes.

My point is not ‘don’t bother throwing starfish back’ but ‘keep your mind open to different possible consequences, and don’t just accept that any form of help is necessarily the best."

Comment from Kendall:

“I wonder these things too. Band-aid solutions. Self-indulgent altruism. Bleeding-heart do-gooders who actually add to the problem. I always worry that I’m one of THEM, failing to see the big picture because I keep myself so busy with the starfish. Both are necessary: we need to make BIG changes (and that usually means working with a whole movement of people); and at the same time we each need to do what we can. If our boundaries of “what we can” are infinitely porous and able to stretch till they snap, we run the risk of burn-out. If we wait for a groundswell of a movement to ride, we run the risk of doing nothing at all, or maybe signing the occasional internet petition and then going shopping. Each of us has to find the balance, examine our motives, and work in community when we can find community.”