Evidently my community has no shortage of people needing help. I assume that's the case because in the telephone book that serves our community and its neighbors, there are more than twenty-five pages of listings for physicians.
It's a large demand for help, perhaps, but not a new one. The centuries-old record of multitudes of sick, lost, and frightened people seeking help seems to be consistent with today's numbers. So consistent, in fact, we may consider the numbers invariable and the suffering inevitable.
Can we ever hope to change this pattern? Should any one of us realistically expect to contribute to a decline in sickness and suffering, or must we resign ourselves and our good intentions to the supposedly inescapable curse of mortality?
