Many of us live in a world of incredible privilege and luxury. At the same time, we’ve become inured to the great suffering that surrounds us. We drive by it in our air conditioned cars, listening to our iPods or our satellite radio, numb to the terrible pain being felt. Occasionally, we get present to suffering––in times of national tragedy, for example––but it’s a natural human tendency to want to avoid the pain it causes us. And so we typically return to our tried-and-true methods of avoidance. We find ways to keep ourselves busy, with work, with entertainment, with the drama of relationships and politics and the endless pursuit of status and acquisitions.
But meanwhile, diarrhea kills millions of kids each year. Unicef tells us that 1.8 million kids each year enter the child sex trade and 24,000 kids die every day from preventable, poverty-related causes. The list of statistics like these are endless, but they’re not surprising to any of us. Glance at CNN or the front page of any newspaper and we can’t help but notice. We might find ourselves overwhelmed by the extent of the world’s need and so we feel powerless. And so we decline to act, or we act in very small ways. We make a donation here and there, or maybe we volunteer locally and participate in a school bake sale. And that gives us a small space to return to our cocoons.
Because we choose to remain numb, we’re able to continue our lives of privilege and luxury without any sense of obligation to ameliorate the world’s problems in any real way. We have it within our power to make a massive difference in the world without any real difficulty; that five bucks we spend on a coffee could pay for life-or-death medications for several children suffering from diarrhea, or provide vaccines to dozens of kids that would keep them from contracting life-threatening diseases. And here’s the funny part: we don’t have to give up our Starbucks. We can make a massive difference in the world without giving up anything that truly matters to us.
And yet, we don’t.
What Authentic is committed to:
Authentic is here to make the world a better place. Period. We’re a talent and literary management company, and we’re involved in creative development and production, but our primary purpose on the planet is to make it a better place. More than anything, we’re here to protect the world’s most vulnerable––the poorest of the poor, and particularly the world’s children. Everything we do, in one way or another, serves that purpose. We strive
to remember that in our daily actions––that we have the opportunity to change the world on a daily basis, and any time we don’t live up to that, we’re squandering that opportunity and potentially costing the world a precious life. Or at very least, through inaction, we’re allowing avoidable suffering to continue. We strive to remember our interdependence with the entire world, and to wake up to this suffering along with the world’s extraordinary beauty.
How we’ll do it:
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