Change Starts with Me
Dr. Charles Pfister standing in front of the World of Experience Statue at College of Wooster
As we prepare to celebrate our country’s birthday this Fourth of July, I personally can’t think of a time when I’ve seen our country more divided and stressed to the max as it has been this year!
Bearing that in mind - and not wanting to add any more proverbial fuel to the fire - I felt I’d make a couple observations after presenting a question. Is our government truly a democracy? In a simple Google search, sure enough Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law presents a very definitive answer - no, our government is not a democracy, but exemplifies the varied nature of a constitutional republic - a country where some decisions (often local) are made by direct democratic processes, while others (often federal) are made by democratically elected representation. I feel in one way this explains everything, and in another it explains nothing!
How did we end up with two divisively different political parties that love to fight, not share, push their own agendas, and always want to be first?
It’s my observation that this may be due to our age… more precisely, United States of America’s age.
If we compare America’s age, this year we are 244 years old. Compare that to say, Ethiopia, founded in 980 BC. Or Japan in 660 BC. Greece in 800 BC. Or, the oldest, Egypt in 3100 BC. We are barely in kindergarten when compared to other countries that could be our great, great, grandparents.
Our country is the kindergartener on the block.
Do you remember kindergarten? Do you remember what we were supposed to learn to enable us to move on to first grade? Robert Fulghum wrote a book in 1986 entitled, All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. In it, he dissects all of the various simple lessons that should serve us for the rest of our lives. For the sake of brevity, I’ll list only the top ten:
Share everything
Play fair
Don’t hit people
Clean your mess
Wash your hands
Flush
Don’t take things that don’t belong to you
Wonder
Question
Live a balanced life
Yep, everything is there, The Golden Rule, ecology, politics, love, and basic sanitation.
So where did America go wrong and why are we so divided and stressed?
I feel we got too smart for our own good, way too electronic-dependent, too advanced, and just too big for our britches. We need to go back to the simpler things in life and remember the simple lessons in life. Thanks to Covid, we appreciate toilet paper. As a country, we are just a very young child, in a very old world.
And what do young children do?
They fight, yell, hoard toys, push, and shove to get to the front of the line for milk and cookies. Watch Congress or the Senate or an election campaign for that matter… looks strikingly similar to a playground at recess in many ways. It seems to me the more advanced we try to become, the more backwards we end up. We want to be the greatest country in the world - Lord knows we have the potential - but proven this Spring, we can’t make enough masks and gloves (or toilet paper for that matter) to protect our people!
We need to… no we MUST… change our what’s-in-it-for-me attitude and replace it with a what-is-better-for-us-as-humans-and-how-can-we-live-and-protect-this-fragile-ecosystem-we-call-earth attitude.
Well, this is an election year, so go out and vote to change our world in a demonstratively positive way. Fighting and violence will not give us the answers or the results we want or need. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandella, Mother Teresa… and the list goes on of those throughout history who have said a positive breath of change must first come from inside oneself before it can change that which is around our outside.
Change must first come from me…
And you!
This Fourth of July, take five minutes of silent meditation to look deep inside yourself, maybe for the first time, and ask yourself, “How can I be a better person, parent, or citizen in order to help America reach her fullest potential and in the process make the world a better place?”
I wish all of you and yours a safe and joyous Fourth of July and I’ll leave you with the profound words of Mahatma Gandhi:
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
- Dr. P