The Problem, In One Sentence

The January 4, 2016 issue of the New Yorker features a profile on Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, written by Larissa MacFarquhar and entitled "What Money Can Buy."

I offer the first sentence from this article for your reflection as it describes the difficulty of the mission of the Ford Foundation as well as the mission of those of us involved in much smaller NGO's and other organizations.

The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological instability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money.

And yet we persist.