Anyone – students too – can make change, speaker says
Students can open a history book and find plenty of examples of changes brought by activists – the Civil Rights movement, women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery. But few are exposed to a deeper understanding of what people went through to bring the changes about, author Paul Rogat Loeb told students.
“This is a tragedy,” said Loeb, a nationally-renowned author and motivational speaker who visited Utah State University students Thursday afternoon as part of the USU Arts & Lectures series.
Loeb joined the active-citizen scene as a student during the Vietnam War; he’s since taken up the cause of activism itself, researching activists in history and interviewing active and inactive citizens today in an effort to understand how those who make change happen do it, and why those who don’t feel they can’t.
The bottom line is anybody can make a difference in a cause he or she believes in, he said – he or she just has to believe it’s possible. After interviewing people across the country for his book “Soul of a Citizen,” he found this is where people get stuck, he said.
Part of the problem is the American culture’s tendency to concentrate on the effects of movements rather than the movements themselves, and the tendency to lift the people who led them onto pedestals, he said – leaving average people with the impression they could never do something like that.
Rosa Parks joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 12 years before she refused to give up her seat on the bus, he said.
“We get the false impression that change comes out of nowhere, and it only takes one great act. And we have this idea that the kind of people who act are heroes,” Loeb said.
But he said the truth is it takes a lot of people and a lot of time and work to bring about change.
“It happens with perserverance and faith and intentionality,” he said. “You work, and when nothing happens you keep on as needed and hope it works.”
Today’s young people are labeled apathetic, lazy, cynical – but it’s not true, Loeb said. Students are caught between life’s pressures and their desires to make the world better, he said. They feel undereducated in the issues they care about and never have enough time to learn more.
“We feel big issues are beyond us, like a high-jump bar you can never jump,” he said.
“There’s never going to be a perfect point, you’re always going to be a little uncertain about your skills, about your knowledge.”
The very process of getting involved teaches people, he said, and it becomes self-propelling. He related stories of students who focused on single issues and within a few years had made major improvements.
“You’re a human being, and you have a right to speak out about what you believe in,” he said. “Any place you look that’s ever had change, it’s always people who have done that. Average people who have acted.”