Below is an introductory excerpt from Paul Loeb’s “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time”, who will be speaking here on campus on Nov. 13th (stay tuned - more info to come!) I like viewing Gandhi not as the master strategist of social change that he later became, but as someone who at first was literally tongue-tied — shyer and more intimidated than almost anyone we can imagine. Given where he ended up on his subsequent journey, who knows what might be possible for the rest of us. But most of us never get the chance to be inspired by the stories of those who’ve acted for change — because we don’t encounter them. For too many of us, the past is a foreign country. The very stories that might remind us of our potential impact and strength are ignored, caricatured, or otherwise dismissed by our cultural gatekeepers. As a result, apart from a handful of famous names largely detached from their contexts, most of us know next to nothing of how ordinary men and women have fought to preserve freedom, expand the sphere of democracy, and create a more just society. Of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, we at best recall a few key leaders—and often, as with Rosa Parks, we don’t know their actual stories. We know even less about the turn-of-the-century populists who challenged entrenched economic interests and fought for a “co-operative commonwealth.” These days, who can describe how the union movement ended eighty-hour workweeks at near-starvation wages? Who knows about the citizen efforts that first pushed through Social Security? How did the women’s suffrage movement spread to hundreds of communities, and gather enough strength to prevail? youtu.be/Xk0yrZdc_xI
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 20:00:22 +0000