A little Monday morning mythbusting.
First of all, who taught you to teach one? If they were so good, why wasn't the problem solved in your generation?
The biggest political myth is that the middle class can make the poor into the middle class. Only the wealthy can make someone rich. Only the rich can make someone middle class. The middle class can take care of their families, and the upper middle class can do a marginal bit more. But that's all. Let me give you an analogy.
If you're middle class in America, you probably own a car. And you rightly notice that billions of people around the world don't have a car and never will be able to afford one. You are truly blessed, so you decideto give back. You drive kids back and forth to soccer practice. You help your cousin move his house. You take a friend to the airport at the spur of a moment. You carpool to work. All that makes a difference but you are not in the transportation business. On a good day of being a good samaritan with your car, you may favorably compare with a bad day of being a taxi driver, but that's about it. You are never going to compete with somebody who makes their living as a bus driver, and FedEx? Don't even think about it.
Yet people in the middle class still have convinced themselves that if everybody were as generous with their own automobiles as you are, in your spare time, it will change the world. If you run your car off a cliff it will wreck your world, but the transportation industry won't notice. Similarly, the politics of uplift, each one teach one, and unity are all falacious thinking. You cannot change the lives of millions of people in the each one teach one phase.
I mention this to underscore an old quote of a rather famous dude named Malcolm X. You may have heard of him.
The platform that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, our religious leader, stands on is the platfrom of complete freedom, justice and equality for the 20 million black people or so-called Negroes here in America. And he teaches us that because of the seriousness of the condition that our people now find themselves in that it is absolutely impossible to solve our problems with means other than religion. And he teaches us that the religion of Islam is the only religion that will instill within our people the incentive to stand on our own feet. And instead of trying to force ourselves upon whites or force ourselves into the white society or blame the white man for our predicament and constantly beg him for what he has, he says that the only way that we can solve our problem is to unite together among ourselves, among our own kind, clean ourselves up, rid ourselves of the evils that we've become addicted to here in this society and try and solve our problem ourselves.
So if the question of uplift and unity comes to a matter of values, then how can 'each one teach one' manifest itself to this level? Make no mistake that Malcolm is saying that black Americans need to convert to Islam in order to solve their problems. That is the sort of institution, a worldwide religion, that is in the transporation business. One preacher or teacher does not make an institution. It makes a middle class person proud of their beneficial, but marginal, effect on other people.
I just wanted to make that clear. And if that one didn't work here's one more:
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat forever.
Give a fisherman a loan for a boat and he can feed himself, his family and sell more fish in the market. With sales tax on the fish you can pay a policeman to protect the fish market from theft. Grow the fish market through hard work and the man can pay off his loan save for a new boat, hire new fishermen and expand his fleet. More fish allows him to trade with the next village. More spare time allows him to learn new ways of fishing, making his business more efficient, cutting costs, raising profits. Teach a man capitalism and you build a fishing industry.
Village metaphors only work in villages.
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