You Are The Role Model

Agents of change must hold themselves to a higher standard if they wish to have their principles taken seriously. Imagine one of the great speeches by Martin Luther King Junior laced with obscenities. Or using the word “bigly”. Imagine if he decided to wear clothing that called attention to himself rather than his message. Would he have been taken as seriously as he had been? This is not to suggest that King as an individual did not have the right to talk and dress and carry on however he pleased, it is to say that he put aside any personal considerations in order to best represent the movement that was so important to him.

Even Malcom X, despite his often bold and angry words, took the time to annunciate them clearly. And while they did nothing to hide the earnestness of his resistance to the status quo, he always made sure to wear a jacket and tie. It wasn’t so much to show respect for the system that oppressed him and his people, it was to show respect for himself and his message.

That is sort of sacrifices one must make when trying to make the world a better place, and if you do not seek to make an example of yourself, people will find ways to become distracted from your message. If you want your message to be taken seriously, you need to take it seriously yourself, and to do that you must place it above personal desires and preferences. If the message means that much to you, you must show you are willing to sacrifice for it, otherwise don’t expect to convert those who are resistant.

But this goes way beyond dress. Clothes are merely a superficiality few get hung-up on, especially these days. I remember bumper stickers on SUVs saying I Support The Troops during the Iraq War. It always rung hollow to me, to think that you would send people to die in foreign lands rather than reduce your oil consumption. Supporting someone goes way beyond simply saying “atta boy, you go get ‘em”. Supporting someone means helping someone, and that goes beyond a bumper sticker.

Mahatma Gandhi knew how to make people take his message seriously. He went to extreme lengths to show that his cause was not self-serving, far more than almost any of us are willing to go. How are we supposed to take seriously the commitment of our leaders when they are elected to serve, and then retire from office eight or twelve years later as millionaires, with connections that will lead to the accumulation of many more millions in the years to come?

More importantly, how will we convince our enemies that we are sincere and dedicated? They will not see our cause, they will only see our hypocrisy. They will use the millionaires and the hypocrites as poster boys in their campaign to denounce us. And it will be an effective tool.

No, if we want to convert the hard-hearted, we must demonstrate a commitment that cannot be denied. If they find hypocrisy in us, it must be obvious to anyone they speak to that they have to use a fine-toothed comb to uncover it. They must to be made to look like hypocrites themselves in finding the mote in our eye when there is a beam in theirs.

I do not ask of you to be martyrs or hermits. The task we face is daunting, but it is too much to believe we can all be like Gandhi. But we must all find ways to show our commitment to the cause. When we walk down the street, people should see us and have no cause to doubt our commitment to peace and the environment. When we are at the grocery store, our neighbors must see us with our reusable bags, buying sustainable food. They must see non-violence in our behavior towards others if we want the world to value and respect the idea of peace. We must find ways to demonstrate to others that another way is possible!

We must find ways, individually, to set the bar higher. Individual actions alone will not save us, but they will demonstrate to others our convictions. It is what will rally people to our cause and bring about the necessary larger changes. If we cannot demonstrate our own willingness to live as we preach, it will merely appear that we are advocating for laws that humans are not designed to live by.

Our cause is twofold: to prevent nuclear war and reverse the environmental degradation that threatens to end life on Earth. Both must be taken equally serious. And both have at its core the same underlying answer: non-violence. Non-violence is the commitment to finding alternatives to war. It is not a meek and fragile thing but a force of great power, but it requires its adherents to be every bit as brave and sacrificing as those who advance their agenda by killing others. Non-violence is required in order to save our planet as well, because we need to apply the same principle of ahimsa (non-injury) to our planet and other living creatures as we do to ourselves and fellow human beings.

It is easy to get lost in the fear of what is required of us, easy to get lost in self-recriminations when we feel we are never doing enough or are somehow failing. We don’t have time for that. Recognize you will never be perfect, recognize that you too have a right to be happy. Indeed, you will never win converts to your cause if you cannot demonstrate your own capacity for joy, because nobody wants to live a life that will make them miserable. Find your own joy and you will realize how easy it is to get rid of those things in your life you relied on to get you through the day. Yes, you can be happy and revolutionary. I do not think there’s another way.

Our cause is larger than any that came before. King sought to bring non-violent change to the United States, Gandhi, to India. It is our task to teach non-violence to the world. It is our unenviable but necessary task to stand on the shoulders of such giants in order to save a world that is currently intent on destroying itself through violence and selfishness. We must teach it another path, and we must do so not only with our words and arguments but with our actions.

We can no longer call those who make no personal sacrifice for the cause “leaders”. They are poison to the movement. We must dismiss them from our presence and build a community that reflects the proper respect for the cause. We, each of us, must show the commitment, must be the example, to each other and to those we wish to convert. From that community will naturally arise those whom we will be proud to call leaders.