Being Part of the Solution

It is said, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. It is possible that even if you are part of the problem, you are part of the solution. If a train conductor had not rudely removed Mohandas Gandhi from a first class train seat in South Africa because of his ethnicity, Gandhi might never have developed the method of non-violent resistance that would eventually lead to the freedom of India from Imperialism. If the English had not persisted in treating the Indians heartlessly, world opinion would not have turned against them, there would have been nothing to resist and nothing would have changed.

When the police turned fire hoses and fierce dogs on civil rights protesters in The United States, they created imagery that outraged the rest of the country and gave fuel to the movement for equality.

When the Chinese rulers sent tanks into Tiananmen Square to suppress the protestors, it offered an opportunity for one man to stand up to the tanks and create an image of supreme courage that shamed the government in a way that no amount of propaganda could counter. If there had been no tank driver there would have been just a man crossing a street, no picture and no impact.

So, perhaps we should hold hope that when we are thoughtless, cruel, ignorant, or passive we might be an example to inspire someone else to do better than we did. Perhaps someone with courage will take a stand and fight for what is right. Perhaps when we lie, we will inspire another to be devoted to truth. Because love and truth are the most powerful things in the universe, perhaps when we fail them, we will be the catalyst for more good to rise from our failings.

Sometimes things get better after they have gotten worse. So we can continue to live our lives easily and unconsciously and eventually things will be so messed up that they have to change. Or we can wake up now and do the right things, even though they are hard and require us to take stands that may require suffering.

We may be the people who:

Have always done it this way
Don’t want to get involved
Never thought of it that way
Look out for number one
Are just following orders
Are frightened
Have competing interests
Don’t want to rock the boat
Find it too hard
Can’t look that far ahead

Someday our descendents will find it hard to believe that we lived in the conditions of war, injustice, poverty, and environmental callousness that we do. We can hide in our justifications that that’s just the way it was, everybody was doing it. Or we can stand now with those who work for a better, more humane and sensible world.

What can you do?

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