Hero complexes.

Watching a segment on Paul Farmer on 60 Minutes... Since reading Mountains Beyond Mountains a few years ago, my first reaction to anything having to do with Paul Farmer is always positive. But I'm instinctively suspicious of how 60 Minutes might decide to portray him and his work and the issues.

...pause to finish watching the segment...

My first thought is that I sorta want to read Mountains Beyond Mountains again. Because when I read it the first time, I was so fundamentally moved and inspired. Not only by his vision and his understanding of what the right to health means (that no one should be denied the right to health care because of the poverty that results from the accident of their birth) but the network of people that were attracted to that vision and who helped him to build it.

And Paul Farmer is an inspiring person, if only because of his strategy for building his organization or for making it possible to deliver health care. In the 60 Minutes segment, they talk about how Partners in Health, the organization he co-founded, will survive after he is gone because it is run by Haitian physicians in Haiti and Rwandan physicians in Rwanda and so on. PIH depends on community health workers to reach out to patients living in rural or difficult-to-reach areas. So in the end, it's not really about Paul Farmer. His vision would never have come about if there wasn't an army of people equally committed to that vision.

But we can never talk about it that way. By "it," I suppose that I mean Changing the World or however we might put it. It's why we talk about any great change in terms of the great people who represented that change. So Martin Luther King, Jr. becomes a stand-in for the civil rights movement, or Mandela for the anti-apartheid movement, or Gandhi for the independence movement. And we forget that the change they represent would have meant nothing without a mass movement of people who believed in the same ideas.

It's more exciting to tell a "hero" story, though. About the strength of an individual who changes the course of history. And the reality is not quite as "sellable." That change comes about in usually mundane ways, created by people who will be generally forgotten.