What power or even influence has an individual against the behemoths of big business, big brother, big government, global warming, global terrorism, species extinction, starvation in Africa, obesity in the U.S., quagmire in Afghanistan, drought in western America, habitat destruction and eco-system collapse everywhere, and the exploding population of Homo sapiens on planet earth? Can one person alter the course of these and other runaway trains of destruction and tragedy? Do the actions and thoughts and example of an ordinary individual matter?
The answer is yes, but not enough people ask the question.
To judge from such indicators as the less than 50 percent of eligible America voters who vote, the burgeoning market in anti-depressant drugs, and the average number of hours a day most Americans spend watching mindless television it would seem that hopelessness reigns. If it isn’t hopelessness most Americans don’t view the aforementioned behemoths as problems. Another possibility is that many people see them as part of the price of doing business and are not wallowing in hopelessness, but, rather, are filled with hope that such problems will eventually go away before affecting their lifestyles too severely. Either way, the individual who chooses not to be engaged in issues larger than immediate personal survival, happiness, convenience and comfort is still involved in and affected by those issues.
That is, an individual can choose to not engage in the large issues of the time, but no one can choose not to be involved or unaffected. Jim Morrison once said, “No one gets out of here alive.” And no one gets out of here uninvolved. An individual who doesn’t cast a ballot votes with his absence. The individual who remains a silent witness to oppression and injustice and corruption speaks volumes. The man who surrenders passion to propriety has nothing more to say that hasn’t been said before, and he who gives up propriety for passion usually never shuts up about it but often has something worthwhile to say. Those who sell their integrity to the highest bidder are never paid enough, never satisfied or truly engaged.
It takes a whole individual to be engaged.
The whole individual is humanity’s elemental building block. Humanity is the sum of its individuals, each one is inescapably connected to the lives and deaths of each of the others. The unengaged individual is incomplete, and humanity strains to support the spaces the unengaged cannot fill. Humanity suffers, groans and breaks along predictable fault lines of unengaged individuals.
Do the actions and thoughts and example of individuals matter?
Gandhi broke the back and spirit of British imperialism and created modern India.
Martin Luther King broke the back (but, sad to say, not the spirit) of institutionalized racism in America.
David Brower kept the Grand Canyon from being dammed.
Renee Askins got wolves re-introduced into Yellowstone and the American west.
An unknown Chinese man stopped a tank in Tienamen Square by simply standing his ground.
Daniel Ellesberg shortened the war in Vietnam by many months, if not years.
Someone leaked the photos of American military personnel torturing Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison.
Jon Marvel started what has become the Western Watersheds Project which gives the landscape of western America and all its flora and fauna a chance to survive.
Maria Montessori started a school based on the wisdom of children helping themselves and their peers and, in the process, learning to feel (and be) competent and self-assured.
Robert frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowdon followed their conscience, maintained integrity, remain whole.
Each individual matters.
To vote is to be engaged.
Write a letter to the editor.
Protest what you oppose.
Support what you approve.
Adopt a child from a Russian, Chinese or Nicaraguan orphanage.
Speak your mind without fear.
Take a walk in the woods, along a beach or by a river.
Walk across the room, unplug the television and throw it away.