Instead of
Complaining About the Status Quo,
Become the
Change You Desire and Live It
By Pastor Paul J. Bern
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We all need to look for ways to improve our lives
and change our world for the better. We're all here for a purpose.
It's why God put us all here. It's nice to make and keep new year's
resolutions, put a troublesome person out of your life and break
other old habits, but many more people are waking up to the fact that
it's smarter to improve our surroundings and make the kind of
contributions that leave legacies than it is to merely break a bad
habit. Breaking bad habits is good, but helping to build a better
world is far better. To begin with, we can’t create a better world
if we haven’t yet imagined it. How much better then, if we are able
to touch such a world and experience it directly, can we enact in the
here and now the world we actually want to live in. These kinds of
organized grassroots efforts come in all shapes and sizes. At the
bottom end of the scale we see Utopian flavored mass movements like
“the 99%”, Black Lives Matter, the fight for a living wage, and
Occupy Wall Street movements with their stands against inequality,
and for free libraries, ethic of social and economic justice, and
experiments in direct democracy. At the other extreme we see the
ongoing civil war in Syria (and its predecessor, the Arab Spring of
2011) which continues to this day.
“You never change things by fighting the existing
reality,” Buckminster Fuller once advised.“ To change something,
build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” A
brilliant insight, but he was only half right, because the best
direct actions – and social movements – actually do both.
Consider the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s. They were not only
brave acts of resistance against the racism of the Jim Crow South,
but they also beautifully and dramatically prefigured the kind of
world the civil rights movement was trying to bring into being:
blacks and whites sitting together as equals in public spaces. The
young students didn’t ask anyone’s permission; they didn’t wait
for society to evolve or for bad laws to change. In the best spirit
of direct action, they walked in there and simply changed the world.
At least for a few moments, in one place, they were living in an
integrated South. They painted a picture of how the world could be,
and the vicious response from white bystanders and police only proved
how important it was to make it so.
Many people at the forefront of the nonviolent
civil rights movement were moved to action by their Spiritual
commitments. Be it the “Do unto others as you would have others do
unto you” of the Four Gospels, or Gandhi’s call to “Be the
change you want to see in the world,” the ethical traditions of
many religions have powerful roots in dogma that is largely the
teachings of men. It is only when people of faith, such as followers
of Jesus Christ like myself, try to live out their deep principles
and actually walk their talk in the Spirit that they they tend to
come up against the power of tradition. Jesus himself (who promised
that anyone who followed his teaching would always be in trouble) was
one of history’s more brilliant invaders of the human conscience.
He didn’t merely argue that true greatness comes from humbly
serving others, he illustrated it by washing his disciples’ dirty
feet just before the Last Supper. By socializing with outcasts and
the poor, visiting lepers, and always raising up “the least of
these,” Jesus didn’t simply prophesy a future filled with a
beloved community of believers, He made it manifest. And if Jesus did
it, so should we!
With the dominance of market capitalism and its
apologists proclaiming an “end of ideology” (whatever that is),
provocations that stretch our political imaginations are more vital
than ever. I would go a step further, arguing that we need to bring
back Utopian thinking. Utopian thinking is necessary, because it
provides a compass point to determine what direction to move toward
and a measuring stick to determine how far one has come. However, in
an era of media saturation and distrust, this is increasingly hard to
do via criticism alone. Using dystopian visions to sound the alarm –
a more and more popular strategy – is just another form of
criticism that leaves the status quo standing. What is needed instead
are direct interventions that both embody and point toward Utopian
possibilities. Contemporary social movements, it turns out, are chock
full of them.
Of course, we all know that this has about as much
chance of occurring as the WTO has of abolishing itself, that GE is
actually going to give back the taxes it dodged, or that DuPont is
finally going to do the right thing and compensate the 100,000
victims of the Bhopal chemical spill for decades of suffering. Could
we possibly ever live in such a world? “Yeah”, people are
saying, “why don’t we live in such a world?” And we’re more
motivated to go out there to make it happen!
In 2006 members from a coalition of environmental
groups posed as a government agency – the Oil Enforcement Agency –
that should have existed, but didn’t. Complete with SWAT-team-like
caps and badges, agents ticketed SUVs, impounded fuel-inefficient
vehicles at auto shows, and generally modeled a future in which
government takes climate change seriously. Clever protest campaigns
can bring little shards of utopia not just into the streets but also
into our elections and even legislatures. When Jello Biafra ran for
mayor of San Francisco in 1979, one of the planks in his platform
called for beat cops to be voted on by the neighborhoods they
patrolled. Once out in the open, this and other seemingly radical
ideas were revealed as the reasonable proposals they were, and
thousands of San Franciscans voted for Jello.
Even legislation can be Utopian. A legislative bill
called, “What Would Finland Do?” aims to introduce a bill in the
New York legislature to prorate traffic fines according to the net
wealth of the driver. It wouldn’t pass, but a lot of New Yorkers
might think: “Why not?” and the long fight for greater economic
equality might inch a tiny bit forward. (Finland, by the way, has
such a law, and in 2004 the 27-year-old heir to a sausage fortune was
fined $204,000 for driving 50 miles per hour in a 25 mph zone.)
Whether religious or artistic, a playful thought experiment, or a
serious attempt to be true to one’s values in the face of state
violence, Utopian engagement allows us to experience for ourselves
(and demonstrate to others), that another world is necessary,
possible, and maybe even beautiful.
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