My life's ambition is to put myself out of work.
It's true. This is actually something that came up in the lunchroom one day when I was working at the nonprofit Corporate Accountability International in Boston several years ago.
We were a gregarious bunch and lunches and birthday celebrations often turned into fun Q&A sessions. One of our senior people said that her dream was to lie on the beach every day and read.
"C'mon, you'd get bored," said one of the others. "You love gunning for crooked corporations."
"No," responded the beach dreamer. "I want to win this thing. I want to put myself out of work."
Any true activist feels the same way. Sure, the work can be interesting and there's lots of peripheral knowledge and experiences that accrue along the way. But for those of us who really have our hearts in it, it's about the fox, not the hunt.
But for us to put ourselves out of work, we need numbers. We need YOU. And no, that doesn't mean activism has to be your profession. Allow me share two more anecdotes.
During one of my meetings with Noam Chomsky in his office at MIT I asked him, completely off the cuff: "Shouldn't I be going through government documents and primary sources the way you do?" (This is particularly meticulous, painstaking work.)
His answer surprised me. [I'm paraphrasing, slightly.] "No. It wouldn't be worth your time. It's what I'm good at. Why bog yourself down? You can read my findings in my books. Then you do what you do."
Another time I was watching one of the many documentaries featuring Chomsky and the film crew interviewed his late wife, Carol [pictured above], herself a former Harvard professor. Carol Chomsky was, at this point, working as her husband's de facto handler/gatekeeper/tour manager. She was asked a question that Noam himself has been asked countless times.
"What can the average person do to right the wrongs in the world?"
Her answer was simple: "They should lead an activist's life."
The aggregate message of these anecdotes is that we all have certain talents, varying amounts of available time, peculiar strengths and weaknesses. We can't all be 24/7 activists in a career sense. But there is NO EXCUSE for not doing WHAT YOU CAN to make the world a better place for those less fortunate and the generations that will follow us. When Carol Chomsky said we should "lead an activist's life," she meant that doing the right thing should be our mindset -- not something we tack onto our ourselves -- and we should live our lives accordingly.
We don't have to work in the nonprofit sector or become great dissidents or write mighty books. But our words and deeds and attitudes, what we consume, how we live, what we learn, what we teach our children, the opinions we espouse, should all, to some extent, feed into the positive "life stream" of the world.
We should be less selfish, more attuned to what's really happening around us, and have the courage to speak, and stand up for, the truth.
OUR SMALL SACRIFICES COMBINED WILL TURN THE WHEEL OF HISTORY IN HUMANITY'S FAVOR.
You can be a hero with the small decisions you make every day. And, perhaps, with larger actions from time to time.
"HOUSE ON FIRE" is not intended to recruit a generation of Chomskys. It is intended to encourage the "average" person to have the level of awareness that they most certainly should, to seek truth, and to live and die by their conscience. That is what Noam and Carol were talking about.
And, as I and many others see it, that's pretty much what we all owe our fragile planet and our fellow human beings.
And that is what will put us all "out of work."
Take care, keep smiling, and never give up on the future,
Adrian Zupp
LINKS
Noam Chomsky's website: http://www.chomsky.info/
Carol Chomsky's obituary, Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2008/12/20/carol_chomsky_at_78_harvard_language_professor_was_wife_of_mit_linguist/
Corporate Accountability International: http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/
IF YOU FOUND THIS BLOG POST INTERESTING you might like to take a look at KNOWLEDGE AND EFFORT: THE WORLD'S TWO BEST FRIENDS -- PART 1 and PART 2.
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