Here's a new excerpt from the new edition of Soul of a Citizen, on the unexpected fruits from our efforts and how they can intertwine with history. The book reaches the stores March 30, and till things slow down I won't be able to reply back to individual responses, but I hope you like the piece and please do forward it, post it, or pass it on in any way you can. If you want to comment on the Huffington Post version better yet, because that helps build visibility.
Also please visit www.soulofacitizen.org/schedule.htm to see my major spring touring schedule and tell friends. I'm speaking in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, DC, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Atlanta, and Seattle, plus Denver to be scheduled, and fall dates in Miami, Western Massachusetts, Green Bay, Wisconsin and Ithaca, NY, with more to come. You can also pass the word on Facebook.
Here's the piece:
Soul of a Citizen: Vaclav Havel, Barack Obama and Unforeseen Fruits
By Paul Rogat Loeb
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.
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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.
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