Compassion in numbers

Varieties of Error
    By Darcy Miller

Numbers are everywhere, filling up our lives, help ing us make sense of the world. Incomes, grades, speed limits, prices, calories, dates. In the news, there's the daily Dow Jones average, falling crime rates, the number of Americans who go hungry, campaign funds, budget deals. The non-math majors among us sometimes get overwhelmed by numbers and, in protest, temporarily suspend all numerical calculations beyond what is necessary to buy a slice of pizza or add up the number of pages we have left to read. But for all of us--even math majors--numbers themselves leave something wanting in their explanation of life around us, something that needs perhaps a more ambiguous understanding, something that speaks not to our heads but to something deeper. Something like compassion.

It's not easy to feel compassion for a number. One in four children live in poverty, it says in smeared print on a news-paper page. It seems startling, perhaps enough so that we try to picture a pie with one quarter cut out; or we see a line of children in our heads, noting every fourth one as poor. But no matter how long we try to hold onto it, the image fades quickly; it is covered up by news and numbers that hit us more directly and can't be ignored. To really understand what statistics mean, we need more; we need help connecting the numbers in our minds to their meaning.

There have been politicians who understood what is lacking with numbers alone. Robert Kennedy was one. Back when the U.S. government was debating the initiation of the food stamp program, Kennedy wanted to help lawmakers reach the right decision. But he didn't simply stand up in the Congress, armed with a list of statistics provided by his staff. Instead, he took a trip to the Mississippi Delta, and encouraged the photographers and the reporters to come along. He traveled into the crumbling villages, he talked to the men and women, he knelt down to the children, he cried. And the photographers sent back pictures, and the reporters sent back stories, and those who saw them and read them connected the people in those stories to the numbers. They felt what the numbers meant.

Nowadays when politicians travel outside Washington, D.C., it seems that they're traveling to their constituencies, to rev up funding or support for re-election campaigns. They talk in numbers because they live with them--voters, debts, program costs, taxes; and the media, always truthful, reports the same numbers back to us. But about a week ago, there was a little article way in the back of The New York Times, opposite another about Al Gore's questionable fundraising methods. "Stepping over drainage ditches ripe with sewage, past ramshackle homes patched together with cardboard and pallets...," it began. And yet it wasn't some lonely activist, or some unlucky reporter, who was walking in this beaten down village, but a federal representative. It seemed that Richard Gephardt, a supporter of organized labor and an opposer of NAFTA expansion, had decided to go down to Mexico to talk to the workers who fear losing their jobs, like the woman whose daughter had to begin working in a factory at age 13. And the reporters were there to describe the houses, to copy down the people's concerns in their own words--and to send their stories back to the newspapers and to us.

Another federal official, Senator Paul Wellstone, tried this a few months ago too. He went back to Mississippi, to replicate the trip Bobby Kennedy had taken 30 years before, in another attempt to expose the raw and barren poverty in a section of the world few of us in the Northeast know much about. Wellstone even announced his trip well in advance, to ensure a following of media with notepads, tape recorders, and sturdy cameras.

Despite his preparations, very few reporters followed Wellstone on his first trip; apparently his journey did not make for exciting news. "Far-left senator from Minnesota travels to poor rural South." There was no context for his trip, except his admiration of Kennedy's work and his need to help other people see; no immediate reason except his compassion. Compassion wasn't enough in his case. Newspaper reporters need a political framework. Gephardt's trip was well-rooted in the current controversy over trade agreements. It could be that reporters prefer a hero too; and Mr. Gephardt, in "blue jeans and a starched blue shirt with a button-down collar," seems to fit the role better than Mr. Wellstone with his eager voice and effusive manner.

Maybe we, too, need a connection to grasp. And while Mexico is far away, the reports of Gephardt's trip put pictures to the numbers and facts we've been hearing about for so long. A poor Southern town, though much closer geographically, seems--without any current political context--even farther.

I don't know why Gephardt went to Mexico. Possibly he did it for media exposure, for a free image boost prior to a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Maybe he was tired of D.C. traffic and political bickering. Maybe he just likes Mexico. Or maybe when he spoke out against the new trade agreements, he did it because he felt they could be hurtful to the people, and he wanted to help others to see what he saw, and to feel the same compassion. Or maybe it doesn't matter all that much--if one story, or one picture, helped one person feel, it was probably worth the sewage, the ramshackle homes, the blue jeans, and the starched shirt.

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