Spirited Social Change

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.

One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

The obvious contradiction between the waste involved in the overproduction of military devices and the extent of unsatisfied vital needs is in itself an act of aggression which amounts to a crime, for even when they are not used, by their costs alone, armaments kill the poor by causing them to starve.

Justice is love expressed in terms of sheer human need: food, water, clothing, shelter, medicine and health care, education, human rights and freedom, hope for a future for one’s children, freedom from fear and violence, the dignity of work, and participation in society and history. Our lives are made of justice.  Our moral and ethical choices are first of all about justice.

And I strive to discover how to signal my companions… to say in time a simple word, a password, like conspirators, let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us create for earth a brain and heart, let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle.

I’ve grown impatient with the kind of debate we used to have about whether the optimists are right or the pessimists are right. Neither are right. There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence, and that is activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of this innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too any demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace, because it kills the root of the inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.