What Do We Absolutely Need? [sixth in a series]

May 6, 2009 by David Eggleton

This series is to stimulate visions of new niches in the local economy. It's addressed to people with businesses and to enterprising people not yet in business.
 
As I did last time (shelter) and once before that (food), I choose to elaborate on a item in the World Health Organizations's list of Prerequisites for Health:  education.
 
I've been thinking about helplessness and helpfulness.  I've considered the fact that we begin our lives helpless, then, if we thrive, grow and develop the potential to be helpful.  I say the potential because it's a choice.  If we live really long, or have certain misfortunes, we might return to helplessness before we die.  I've considered kinds of helpfulness, too, especially the range from immediate to long-term.  Opening a door for someone seen approaching with full hands doesn't require planning or credentials or a permit, and when it's done, it's done.  The next person with full hands will hold the same hope of just-in-time assistance.  At the other end of the range are interventions that change or replace systems (our chosen arrangements to provide) so that what was an inevitable, if not chronic, problem becomes history, a problem of the past that won't trouble anyone again.  In terms of my example, change on the order of no more doors or no more full hands.
 
As far as we know, both types of helpfulness require education.  Fortunately, much education comes organically via observation and imitation of parents, siblings and others in our worlds; in fact, that goes on long after we are exposed to other educational processes.  It's by observation and imitation, and a dash of the golden rule, that most of us become aware, considerate door openers.
 
In contrast, somewhere along the immediate-to-long-term continuum, most of us realize we have no one to imitate.  We begin to feel out of our depth, not where we're strong and confident.  Thus experiencing another kind of helplessness, we leave the system analysis and change making (or blocking) to a dwindling few.  Often, they make us pay, one way or another.  Having trained for a certain niche in THE ECONOMY, we're simply overspecialized.  They have us where they want us!
 
Together we have persistent, enormous and unprecedented problems.  The greatest solutions will come from the greatest participation, so I'm thinking we need education for adults as well as youths that enables everyone of age to function throughout the range of helpfulness.  Full participation is the antidote to specialization.  When it's local, it also offsets globalization, which is too oil dependent to be the basket in which we have all our eggs.
 
Any helpfulness education providers out there?  For full disclosure:  I aspire to be one.
 
There is always a market in a locale for the goods and services that satisfy fundamental human needs.