Recently I read a Sports Illustrated cover story on Lance Armstrong’s retirement from cycling, and how he is giving his time to the fight against cancer. He pursues speaking engagements and endless meetings with powerful or rich people so that he can raise money for his foundation and, someday, eradicate cancer as a life-threatening illness. He eschews party politics, opting instead to reach out to anyone willing to help.
The article described how Armstrong applies his legendary abruptness to his task. He cajoles and pleads, but he also demands and shames, to get people to help in his quest. At one point in the story, he tells Joshua Bolten, today the White House chief of staff but then the budget director, “I know there’s Iraq and Afghanistan and Katrina, but this is more important.” Talking to the Sports Illustrated reporter, Armstrong pointed out that cancer kills 1,500 Americans each day. And one of his colleagues remarked that people are far more afraid of getting cancer than they are of other bad news, like a terrorist attack.
To me, this represents the classic tension between what is urgent — cleaning up after Katrina, protecting the troops (and hopefully the citizenry) in Iraq — and what is more needful. Not that we shouldn’t shore up New Orleans, or shouldn’t try to improve the situation in Iraq — heaven forbid — but that cancer is actually, indisputably, a greater threat in the long run, and ought to be targeted accordingly. For Armstrong, this means unlocking billions of federal dollars for cancer research and, with or without the government billions, raising many millions of private money through his foundation.
Would that more of us were willing to shift our priorities to what is really needful rather than what is urgent. We succumb to the dulcet pleadings of advertisers to buy into this mutual fund, or to eat that doughnut. Advertisers are experts at creating urgency where none existed before, and so we look into that mutual fund, when in fact the most needful thing most people could do to improve their financial situation is simply to live within their means, or perhaps to improve career prospects through better training and more concentrated effort on the job. We experience an urgent desire for the doughnut despite the greater need to lay off the sweets and improve our health. We ignore what is needed over the long term in favor of what burns at the moment.
Armstrong is quite right that the same thing happens perpetually within government budgeting. Many people, in theory, would rather that the government, the society, spent more money more intelligently on schools and less money on prisons. Yet too many of us clamor for the government to “get tough” with petty criminals, especially petty drug criminals, who overburden our prison system yet present no large threat to society. What is needful is a larger commitment to revise our drug laws, our penal code, and our approach to incarceration on the one side, and our whole approach to education on the other. But to raise the issue too strenuously draws the brickbats of those who are invested in the status quo, whether they make money from building prisons, or make political hay from appearing “tough” about drug laws, or simply because they have an emotional investment in maintaining “order” in our society — regardless of how fictive or corrupt their brand of order is.
If we focused on needful things rather than urgent ones, we would not be misled by the election-year shenanigans of politicians. The United States would seek some comprehensive improvement in its labor relationship with Mexico, rather than wasting time arguing about a ridiculous, spendthrift wall separating peaceful neighbors. We would plow money into cancer research before we would prop up a failed military project in the Middle East. Individually, we would remember that living to a ripe old age with a healthy heart is better and more needful than eating our fill of junk here and now.
It is a challenge. Our appetites take over and want to be satisfied; if they didn’t few smokers would keep up smoking, because the pleasure in the short term wouldn’t justify the lung damage (et cetera) in the long term. But alas.
Reflect on this: What in your own life is needful? What are the merely urgent signals to which you respond instead? How could your relationship to needful and urgent ends change?
