Arthur C. Brooks had a column in the Saturday New York Times in which he challenged me to think small. Arthur Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute and he is a conservative. I like to agree with conservatives when they say smart things. My theory is that this gives me more legitimacy when I disagree with the stupid things conservatives say.

“Think small,” writes Arthur Brooks. “In the fund-raising business, there’s an old axiom that ‘one is greater than one million.’ This isn’t bad math; it is a reminder that when it comes to people in need, one million is a statistic, while one is a human story.” Looking at an individual instead of statistics is the antidote for psychic numbing.

In two separate conversations (on Thursday and Friday) I reflected on how disconnected I am from human suffering. I know it exists, but I don’t have a personal connection with the human story. 

My son-in-law, Doug Pearson, is a certified volunteer with Red Cross. He recently got a 1:00 a.m. call. The Red Cross is not involved when there is a house fire and the occupants have insurance and family support. The Red Cross intervenes when the family has none of the normal safety net resources. These are people in the midst of being propelled from bad to worse.

My son, Mel, recently spent a few days in Jackson, Mississippi. One aspect of the Christian community development work of the Perkins Foundation involves the restoration of houses in their neighborhood which then provide adequate housing for disadvantaged individuals—single mothers and their children being a significant example. It was Friday at American Dream in Corvallis that we talked about Jackson, John Perkins, and homeless shelters. The next morning I read To Make the World Better, Think Small.

Then at church on Sunday, Elizabeth Sherwood mentioned the personal connection she and others at Newberg Friends Church have with a Syrian refugee family now living in Salem. 

I put these "think small" anecdotes together and feel challenged/inspired by the picture they create. But Arthur Brooks slips into his op-ed piece a reference to a longer paper written by Paul Slovic. And with a simple link we are treated to a Mother Teresa quote, and the less pleasant issue of genocide. From careful research Slovic addresses topics such as "numbers and numbness," "the collapse of compassion," and the deficiency of numbers when not connected to feeling. Slovic's paper on psychic numbing and genocide was published in 2007. Events of the past ten years continue to affirm that large numbers are merely statistics.

Thinking small is not a simple matter no matter how you look at it--especially when you know that 1,000,000 represents a million human stories.