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A friend of ours was walking down a deserted Mexican beach at sunset.
As he
walked along, he began to see another man in the distance. As he grew
nearer,
he noticed that the local native kept leaning down, picking something
up and throwing
it out into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things out into
the ocean.
As our friend approached even closer, he noticed that the man was picking
up starfish
that had been washed up on the beach and, one at time, he was throwing
them back into
the water.
Our friend was puzzled. He approached the man and said, "Good evening,
friend. I was
wondering what you are doing."
"I'm throwing these starfish back into the ocean. You see, it's low
tide right now and all
of these starfish have been washed up onto the shore. If I don't
throw them back into the
sea, they'll die up here from lack of oxygen."
"I understand," my friend replied, "but there must be thousands of starfish
on this beach.
You can't possibly get to all of them. There are simply too many. And
don't you realize
this is probably happening on hundreds of beaches all up and down this
coast. Can't you
see that you can't possibly make a difference?"
The local native smiled, bent down and picked up yet another starfish,
and as he threw it
back into the sea, he replied, "Made a difference to that one!"
Author Unknown