Making a Difference

Hey everyone! I'm reading Half the Sky- Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. It's a great book that talks not just about oppression but highlights the great work by many courageous men and women. Anyways, I loved this quote:

The third lesson is that even when a social problem is so vast as to be insoluble in its entirety, it's still worth mitigating. We may not succeed in education all the girls in poor countries, or in preventing all women from dying in childbirth, or in saving all the girls who are imprisoned in brothels. But we think of Neth and remeber a Hawaiian parable taught to us by Naka Nathaniel, the former Times videographer, himself a Hawaiian:

A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water. "What are you doing, son?" the man asks. "You see how many starfish there are? You'll never make a difference." The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean. "It sure made a difference to that one," he said.


As my 2 cents, what a difference it could make if the little boy could convince all of his friends to throw some starfish back, too?