When Small Steps Yield Unforeseen Fruits

To
keep the political hope to stay involved, it helps to remember that our
actions
can bear unforeseen fruits. Change comes, to be sure, when we shift
governmental or corporate policies, elect better leaders, or create
effective
local alternatives that can serve as broader models. Despite the limits
of the just-passed
health care bill, and the need to improve it through further
legislation, it's
a major victory that over thirty million more Americans will now have
health
insurance, largely paid for through taxes on the wealthy. So concrete
results
matter, including the sometimes razor-thin elections that shifted the
Senate
and House from bodies dedicated to handing favors to a tiny elite, to
ones at
least beginning to pass legislation benefiting ordinary Americans.

But
change also comes when we stir the hearts of previously disengaged
citizens and
help them take their own moral stands. We never know how the new-found
involvement of those we engage will play out in the rest of their lives,
but if
we inspire enough people to take those first steps in speaking out for
justice
we can sometimes transform history.

* * *

I
once
went for a run in Fort Worth,
Texas, in a grassy park along a
riverbank. Coming upon a man shaking a tree, I hesitated, then stopped
and
asked, "What are you doing?"

"It's
a
pecan tree," he said. "If I shake it enough, the nuts will come
down. I can't know exactly when they'll fall or how many. But the more I
shake
it, the more I'll get."

This
seems
an apt metaphor for social involvement. Often our efforts may yield few
clear or immediate results. Our victories will almost always be partial,
as the
health care bill exemplifies. But we need to draw enough strength from
our
initial steps to help us persevere. "You have to begin with small
groups," said Modjesca Simkins, a veteran South Carolina civil rights
activist told me
when she was eighty four. "But you reach the people who matter. They
reach
others. Like the Bible says, leaven in the lump, like yeast in the
dough. It
rises somewhere else. "

Under
Czechoslovakia's
Communist dictatorship, playwright (and, eventually, president) Vaclav
Havel
helped build the country's nascent democracy movement through such
apparently
futile actions as defending a Czech rock band, Plastic People of the
Universe,
when the authorities broke up their concerts with police raids and
sentenced
key members to prison. Unexpectedly, the defense committee Havel created
to
defend the band evolved into the country's key human rights and
democracy
group, Charter 77. Later Havel launched a
petition, together with other writers and civic activists, to free a
group of
different political prisoners. Even though they were only asking the
president
to include the group in a Christmas amnesty, critics said that those who
circulated the petition were being "exhibitionistic," dismissing
their motives as nothing more than an attempt "to draw attention to
themselves."

When
Havel reflected on the incident seven years later, he
acknowledged that they hadn't succeeded in freeing the prisoners at the
time.
But he still didn't think the critics were right. When the prisoners
finally
got out of jail, they said it had helped them to know that they weren't
alone.
This mattered because the movement needed their courageous voices. More
importantly, for many of the people who signed the petition, it was
their first
step in standing up for their beliefs. And it wasn't their last. They
went on
to play dissident music, put on dissident plays, speak out in
classrooms,
preach from pulpits, and challenge the regime in a hundred different
ways--until there were so many speaking out that the government couldn't
put
them all in jail. Eventually, they brought down the dictatorship without
a shot
being fired. Had Havel and the others not persevered with efforts that
seemed
initially fruitless, they'd never have built the movement that
ultimately
prevailed.

Havel's
story
reminds us that even in an apparently losing cause, one person may
unknowingly inspire another, and that person yet a third, who may then
go on to
change the world, or at least a small corner of it. Rosa Parks was part
of a
similar chain of inspiration. Her husband, a barber named Raymond Parks,
co-founded the Montgomery NAACP. After Raymond and Rosa met and married,
he
convinced her to attend her first NAACP meeting, a key step on the path
to her
famed stand on the bus a dozen years later. But who first convinced
Raymond
Parks to speak out, at a time when progress was elusive? Although we'll
probably never know, it almost certainly took a succession of people and
conversations. The links in any chain of influence and inspiration are
too
numerous, too complex to trace them all. But they remind us that, by
encouraging others to get involved, we can have a continuing impact
through all
of their future actions.

Barack
Obama
himself first became politically involved through exactly this process.
It was during the campus anti-apartheid movement, when students at
school after
school pushed their administrations to divest from companies doing
business in South Africa--an
effort that Archbishop Desmond Tutu later credited as playing a critical
role
in securing his country's freedom. At Occidental
College in Los Angeles, a former Green Beret and Vietnam
Vet named Gary Chapman transferred in from a community college and
created the
Student Coalition Against Apartheid. The group held rallies and debates,
showed
documentaries, brought in speakers, circulated petitions, and marched on
their
local Bank of America branch. With the help of supportive professors,
they even
secured a unanimous faculty resolution to divest. But the college
trustees--highly conservative Southern California
business leaders--refused to go along.

Chapman
had
just graduated when Obama arrived at Occidental in the fall of 1979,
and
began working with the Student Coalition, which other students had kept
going.
Although Obama's role in the campaign was modest--he helped bring in
touring
speakers from the African National Congress, attended some organizing
meetings,
and spoke at a key rally--his involvement opened up a world in which he
could connect
his actions to his beliefs. Looking back, he credited this experience
for
laying the foundation for everything that followed, including his
considering
the vocation of community organizer. Had other students and faculty not
taken
the risk of standing up for what they believed--thus encouraging Obama's
participation--he might never have started down the path that ultimately
led to
the presidency, and to all the possibilities that remain for it, and
could
still be realized if the rest of us become sufficiently involved.

None
of
us can predict when the causes we support will capture the popular
imagination
or enlist someone who goes on to do powerful work for justice. "Before
water turns to ice," writes psychologist Joanna Macy, "it looks just
the same as before. Then a few crystals form, and suddenly the whole
system
undergoes cataclysmic change." Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould
developed
a theory he calls "punctuated equilibrium." Rather than occurring at
a steady pace, evolution proceeds in fits and starts, Gould argued. Long
stretches of relative stasis are followed by brief periods of intense
transformation, when many new species appear and others die out.
Although
attempts to improve social and economic conditions usually proceed
incrementally, it is impossible to foretell precisely when any of our
endeavors
will reach critical mass, and bear unexpected fruits.

The
chains
of influence created by this stream of human courage almost always have
humble beginnings. A few years ago I heard a talk by Wangari Maathai,
the
Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner. She described attending a small
Catholic
college in Atchison, Kansas, where she engaged in conversations
about social justice that were critical to her transformation into a
social
activist. Both fellow students and faculty opened up new worlds to her.
They
got Maathai thinking about what needed to be done and what she could do.
After
returning to Kenya to become
the first East African woman to get her Ph.D. at the University of
Nairobi,
she founded the Green Belt Movement, which has planted 40 million trees
in an
effort to reduce soil erosion. She also challenged the dictatorship of
Daniel
Arap Moi, demanding multi-party elections and an end to political
corruption.
The government imprisoned and violently attacked her, but a year after
Maathai
won the Peace Prize she was elected the first president of the African
Union's
Economic, Social and Cultural Council. None of this would have happened,
she
said, were it not for the conversations with those who'd inspired her
when she
was in college. As I listened, I wondered what it would be like to have a
young
Wangari Maathai or Barack Obama sitting next to you, and discovering
years
later that you'd helped set them on their path.

Adapted from the wholly updated new
edition
of "Soul of a
Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times" by Paul Rogat
Loeb (St Martin's Press, publication date
April 5, 2010, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print,
"Soul" has become a classic guide to involvement in social change.
Howard Zinn calls it "wonderful...rich with specific experience."
Alice Walker says, "The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can
be
another name for love." Bill McKibben calls it "a powerful
inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity."