On Change
“If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
Most stories that connect with us as humans at the deepest level involves a group or individual on the margins or underside of power, rising up and defeating the giant that is holding them down.
Systems exist to perpetuate themselves…In the Matrix trilogy, our minds are melted by not only the special effects but also how the story played out after the first installment. We see that the agents who ran the Matrix wanted…needed…the Zion/Neo movement and the “Tho One” to exist in order to give the marginalized something to believe in so that they would continue to think that they were making a change.
And why? Because giant systems want us to BELIEVE in something because belief is NOT the same thing as ACTION. I can BELIEVE a lot of things but if I don’t alter my life around them, I am not a threat to anyone. Governments, Corporations, Religions, all want me to keep believing in something because then I can pacify myself with all the things I wish were different and I can wax poetic on how it SHOULD be. Meanwhile, I am spending my MONEY and giving my TIME to the same power that is lulling me to sleep with commercials and messages of, “If you could just get this THING, then your life would be wonderful.”
What if we had eyes to see that life is ALREADY wonderful? What if we could see that there is nothing else that we need in THIS MOMENT? What if that led us to ACTIONS that began to disrupt the current status quo?
I will offer a guess at what would happen.
CHANGE…and probably not safe change…because the current systems of power run on one thing…our compliance. The way out is to stop playing that game and start playing an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT ONE. Money is the biggest weapon the system uses to control us. We can flip the system on itself. If we begin to vote with our dollar with every purchase we make, change will occur. Think bigger than where your next cup of coffee comes from (although that is as good a place as any to start). Think about your clothes, your food, what types of media you consume, what type of house and/or housing development you live in, what type of educational opportunities should be available to EVERY child regardless of income, and then subsequently the amount of money that our teachers should make to provide that opportunity.
This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. I keep reading about men and women, boys and girls that are no longer settling for the options that they are presented with. If they are presented with 3 options and none of them are good solutions, they invent their own way and begin to solve problems without the help of the giants that are out there ruling the world.
