Waiting for change or acting for change

On Linkin Park’s recent album “A Thousand Suns” they remixed a portion of Martin Luther King Jr’s speech “Beyond Vietnam in which he publicly denounced the war as unjust. The words from the track:

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,
Because my conscience leaves me no other choice.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war:
This way of settling difference is not just.
This business of burning human beings with napalm,
Filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows,
Of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane.

Of sending men home from the dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged,
Cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

Through this prism of judging our action against wisdom, justice, and love I believe we can more closely align our governmental policies to be fair and equal. Not that income has to be redistributed or that we need a socialistic government but that we can debate a policy proposal on these three criteria as something that makes our communities a better place to live, a safer place, a just place, a place of access for our most basic human needs. Is that wrong?

This post was originally going to branch into the idea that change comes slowly. I wanted to incorporate the quote of change coming from a small group of people.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead.

It is difficult to understand why this is but think about Newton’s laws of motion. A small force pushes an object in a direction and without friction that object would continue to move. But our world is full of forces that push back and try to hold onto the status quo. These are powerful forces. Think of these forces as the friction on the object. This object eventually then stops. With a few small forces (or a small group of people) it can withstand more friction and move that particular object just that much further. It would be great to get millions of people to be able to push the same object in the same direction but that becomes the equivalent of herding cats and the object is then being pushed in every which way possible.

Much to my chagrin I have not formulated a past the problem. The best that I can come up with at this moment is that we must continue pushing on the object and move in some positive direction. If not we lose our power, we lose the fight and the powers that be continue to win in the status quo. A little pessimistic maybe. But it is the truth. That we must utilize some of our energy towards progress. It is not just that we must but that we also can. We have the ability, we have the tools at hand, we have the voices ourselves, we have the causes to rally around.

So I ask are you on board? Are you ready to commit (or recommit) to this idea? May be it can be a New Year’s Resolution? Or it can just be an opportunity to do something bigger than yourself. Whatever reason it is I hope that you are ready.