Marathon Report 1: Ti(red)

U2′s Bono, with the help of Bobby Shriver, created (Product) RED in the hopes of engaging the “marketing prowess and funds” of the private sector to fight against HIV and AIDS in Africa. Different businesses have teamed up with (Product) RED, marketing their normal products either in the color red, with a picture of Africa,  or with the (RED) logo somewhere on the product itself. Gap is one of the business that works with (PRODUCT) RED, and uses a clever gimmick to sell shirts, jackets and knick-knacks, with half the proceeds going to the Global Fund to eliminate AIDS.  Gap will print a word on the front of one of their t-shirts, and set-off the letters “R,” “E,” and “D”  with parentheses. For example: Inspi(red), Wi(red), and Desi(red). Having both worked in Africa and liking Gap clothes, I couldn’t help but buy one of these shirts (or accept one from my brother for Christmas). The particular (RED) shirt I own is the color red, and has the words “Two Weeks” printed in white on the front. Supposedly, the money donated by Gap for the sale of each one of these shirts is equivalent to the average cost in Africa of two weeks of antiretroviral medication for one person with HIV.

Usually, on the day before the race,  I like to lay out all the clothes and race essentials that I will be using the next day.  This serves the dual purpose of making sure that I have all the equipment I need, and, like the true cyclist in me, making sure I don’t cross the finish line in clothes that don’t match. Prepping for a 33 degree race in the morning, I knew I would have to pile on a number of layers to keep the body warm. I had the bottom: shoes, black Under Armor tights, and black shorts, but for the top I only had a red spandex shirt, and needed another layer to wear on top of it. Aha! I my Gap shirt would be perfect, and would not only match my race garb, but promote a good cause along the way.

But I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t wear it.

If the money donated for the purchase of the shirt, say, about $15, would provide antiretrovirals for one person for two weeks, then with the money I used to enter the Detroit Marathon, $70, I could have purchased antiretrovirals for someone living with HIV for more than 8 weeks. But I didn’t. In our culture, in our developed-world, middle-class bubble, completing a marathon is quite an accomplishment. But pulling out that Two Weeks shirt reminded me of the global culture that I vowed to keep in perspective after all the time I have spent with some of its weaker members.  Now this is nothing new for me, nor for any others that have spent time living and working with the world’s poor. I remember when I came back from Honduras, I was young, naive when I left, and appropriately jaded by our consumer culture when I returned. After working in an orphanage for kids with HIV, every time I looked up at the road bikes mounted on the wall, the beautiful, carbon-fiber, aerodynamic, works of art, I was slightly revolted by them. It turned my stomach to think of the effect those couple thousand dollars could have had on the kids in the orphanage, had it not been spent on road bikes.  It was a text-book case of reverse-culture shock, an influx of emotion that you get when you come home after working with those in poverty, that kick to the intellectual junk, that shock, that complex and intricate emotional paradox that can basically be summarized by saying, “well shit, I’m a pretty selfish bastard.”

After a time, I learned how to deal with this feeling of post-travel selfishness. Eventually, I, and I think most that have had this experience, come to realize that  certain behaviors take on fundamentally different meanings in different contexts. While working in Africa, I had to pass people hobbling down the street with tires wrapped around their amputated legs every day,  avoiding eye-contact as they asked only for a few cents change for food.  The $5 I planned to spend on a latte at the corner had a very real, visceral meaning to it, and few people would deny that its morally preferable to give this man some change for a meal and sacrifice the nutritionally empty coffee-treat I was about to have. In my life in the US, when suffering and poverty aren’t the perpetual backdrop, spending that $5 on something as indulgent as a latte would hardly be looked on as shameful.  Now, I want to be absolutely clear: I’m not arguing for or against this consumer culture, not knocking the money we spend on drinks, shirts, marathons, nothing like that. I’m simply pointing out that the same behavior can mean two entirely different things, can be judged as reprehensibly selfish or harmlessly indulgent, simply by the background in which that behavior takes place. Sure, I would love for us to open our minds as a culture, for our “context” to truly become global, for human suffering, no matter where it is occurring, to be the ultimate factor for all our decisions, especially economic. But if there is one thing I have learned from spending a shitload of time with the poor, its that the conclusions I have come to and the questions I ask myself  developed only because  I spent a shitload of time with the poor.  One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to consider ourselves “enlightened,” to think that just because we have been given the clarity that only comes with living and working with the poor, that everyone else will automatically have that clarity, that enlightenment. So many young idealists (myself included, once upon a time), come back to their comfortable lives only to be disappointed by the lack of philosophical shift in those around them. They end up judging the behaviors of those in their former lives as if those individuals just went through the same transformation as said young idealists, basically, they see the latte in their friend’s hand as reprehensibly selfish, when, contextually, it is probably harmlessly self indulgent.

So there I stood, staring at the Two Weeks shirt…. de-volving… Why are we able to mobilize this many people to run 26.2 miles? Can you imagine if we harnessed that collective energy and used it for a more “worthy” cause? What if we directed that energy toward fighting homelessness? Toward insuring our sick? Toward fighting global poverty? What does it say that the 3,796 finishers of the Detroit Marathon paid, at about $70 a piece, about $265,720 to run? And moreover, what does the fact that, at 100 calories a mile, 3,796 people burned more than 9,945,000 calories?!?!? That means this micro-cosm of our culture, of our nation, has $265,720 dollars to spare, and almost 10 million expendable calories? The World Food Programme states that 2,100 calories a day are needed for a person to live a healthy lifestyle. Less than this, and one becomes hungry, and “a hungry mind cannot concentrate, a hungry body does not take initiative, a hungry child loses all desire to play and study.”  That means if, instead of burning these calories unnecessarily, we donated the food the marathon forced us to consume, we could make sure 13 children get, for one year, enough calories to allow them to develop at the appropriate rate and avoid malnutrition.  And, to use our  simple Two Week formula, if we spent the $265,720 on antiretroviral treatments instead of entry fees, we could provide 63 people with HIV with antiretrovirals for a year.

But I think I was making the same latte-in-the-hand mistake.  Suddenly, all these people doing the marathon… were they selfish? Was I selfish?

And as I folded my Two Weeks shirt and put it back in my drawer, I had thoroughly tainted all these people’s future accomplishment by assessing their behavior by a different standard. I had missed the essence of what they were doing: ironically, participating in one of the few cross-culturally laudable endeavors: athletics…