Growth is a rather strange concept. It is measured in centimetres, kilogrammes and dollars but never in opinions, thoughts or feelings. Pie charts and graphs tell me that my country is growing. There are buildings rising around me like great mountains of stone and glass. There is new technology and new teaching methods to help our children. There are new ideas and enormous plans for my future placed upon my plate and left for me to decipher. All of this leaves me excited and hopeful for what time brings for me. Yet strangely enough, I feel an odd disconnect to this new world being built around me. I cannot fit myself into this place and imagine how a developed world would feel for me. Am I frightened of the change, or is my idea of growth simply different from what I see happening?
A while ago, as we paused at a stoplight on a road that I use nearly every day, I saw an impoverished woman with tattered clothes asking for financial aid. She was holding a picture wrapped in plastic of a small baby in her hands. As I looked at her face and I recognised it, the most heartbreaking thought emerged. I realised that this woman had been at the same stoplight for more than a year, even when she was pregnant. There was dust in her hair and her heels were cracked. Why had growth not found its way to her as yet?
Perhaps it is because we find ourselves viewing our future through the wrong lens. We raise grand structures, try our hand at new industries, educate our children and focus on starting a new era for our country.
Then, we forget to give the common man our vision. Indifference is the strongest inhibitor of change. Why should a man struggling to put food on his table today care about what happens in ten years? Why should he find enjoyment in walking on a smoother road when he is going to the same place he did back when the road was still rough? How do we show these people that growth will reach everyone equally?
I struggle to find answers to these questions because there are too many factors involved in the process of change. There is no single body or group of people that should be responsible for change because its consequences are too universal for its workload not to be shared by everyone. The only way we can get the common man to care about something as intangible as growth is by letting him be a part of the process of achieving it. We show him that the road becoming smoother is the first step to his destination becoming better. We teach him to take pride in the little things we achieve because growth cannot be immediate. We let him observe the world around us and voice his opinions where it matters. Then we teach him to notice the important things in heartbreaking situations; to notice things like the fact that the impoverished woman was not holding her baby, but only a picture of it. To notice the hands reaching out to help.
