ENDING HUNGER Ending Hunger: "It's Up To You and Me" June 1980 These are excerpts from a speech given by John Denver at the Hunger Project Symposium in Glen Cove, New York. For the past 2 years I've served on the Presidential Commission on World Hunger. All of my life I've been out meeting people, being involved with people, learning about the world, learning about myself, learning about my place in the world, what it was I wanted to do in my life, and what the possibilities were for doing something. In all of these experiences, I have found one thing that is like an insoluble barrier - like concrete and iron. It's a thing we called separation. We take advantage of every excuse we can imagine to separate ourselves one from the other. One of the recommendations of the Presidential Commission has to do with the fact that eliminating hunger can be done and can be done in our lifetime. The Commission says all that is necessary is the political will to do so. I disagree with that totally. It's close, but it's not true. What I think will make the difference is the "popular will." I don't care how much money you have, how strong the program is, it's not going to work if it doesn't have the support of the people - popular will. We're not getting the people involved in ending hunger, and we're not communicating to people why this is important to them. Politics isn't working anymore. Government isn't working anymore. They are so mired in a system that has been that way so long that they can't see how it's working: the water's too muddy. They couldn't see a road out of it if you put spotlights on it and painted arrows! Think for a minute about those people you see screaming on television every night now, waving the flag in front of the U.S. Embassy in Iran - do you think those people feel any differently about their children than you do? Do you think that their deepest feelings about their lives are any different from yours? When you get down to humanity, when you get down to people, we are the same. We have an incredible, unifying specific, which is human skin, and it's the same for all of us. Think of yourself as part of the human family, and recognize that we are all in this together. It is time for each of us to make a conscious choice. The conscious choice is to start living and reflecting that thinking: that we are part of the human family, this it is our planet, that there is enough to go around, and that we do have everything that we need. Look beyond the differences in organizations - all the differences wherever it is that you see differences - and work as human beings. Take what you have learned, what you have done with your lives, to hlp other people. If we get people to make a conscious choice, then all the rest of it is going to start falling right into place. The incredible obstacles that stand in the way of the things that we've been working for, for so long, will disappear, because the power of the people, the power of human kind, will turn it around. The conscious choice, in my mind, is the commitment to life, not my life, but LIFE.