Change That I Have No Choice But to Believe In

My new exercise is to keep remembering that things can change. This really should not be that difficult of an exercise, especially considering I just voted for change last month and saw that it can really happen. But so many areas, so many people, need more drastic change. They need more than just talk about change. They need change to be implemented. And they need it yesterday.

Working for change is difficult primarily because it is difficult to see change in real time. Change takes time. But things do change. Just think of the past one hundred years. Superpowers have come and gone. The Cold War came and went. Women gained the right to vote in the United States and elsewhere. Women became heads of state around the world. Television was invented. Al Gore invented the internet and introduced us to gratuitous PDA in politics. The atomic bomb was invented. The atomic bomb was used. Nazi Germany came and went, as did East and West Germany. Israel was created. So was Hezbollah. The plane was invented. TWA went under. William Shatner went from the final frontier to Priceline. It‘s pretty neat that he‘s still involved in travel. Colonialism (but not neo-colonialism) ended in Africa. New states were born. Man went into space. Woman went into space. A Great Depression started and ended. A new depression began. Cars were invented. American cars were the coolest. American cars ceased being cool. Americans are playing soccer professionally in Europe. It’s fashionable to live in Brooklyn. You can find falafel anywhere. Forty plus years ago, the civil rights movement challenged America. A month ago, a black man named Barack Hussein Obama was elected President of the United States. I could go on.

All of this happened within the past one hundred years. So yes, things can and do change drastically in a relatively short period of time.

My new exercise is necessary because during my short life, so many things in Kenya, and all over Africa, have not changed on the surface. My measure of change isn’t whether people are better off today than they were twenty or thirty years ago (which is sadly debatable in many places). My measure of change is how people’s standard of living today compares with society’s progress. Unfortunately, in many ways, society is Usain Bolt to the people‘s whoever-that-guy-was-who-came-in-second-in-the-100 meters-at-the Olympics. Usain is pulling away, and soon people forget who that other guy was. As technology develops, and the standard of living for those who have improve exponentially, masses of people are being left further and further behind. I think an appropriate motto for what we need to do is: “Mind the Gap.” The number of people who fall victim to “the gap” in England pales in comparison to those who fall victim to the standard of living gap. If the standard of living gap continues to grow, it will manifest itself in some pretty ugly ways in the future, especially in Africa. That much is clear.

Faced with these challenges, it is not difficult to imagine how people can fixate on stagnation in their communities. The people’s “representatives” are as corrupt as ever. The rich just keep getting richer, and the slums keep growing. Regardless of what the latest studies might say about people incrementally doing better or worse, people are as disgruntled as ever. Studies often obscure the people’s reality on the ground. All people crave is a government that works for them, but unfortunately, they have no idea what that looks or feels like. Their representatives are more interested in representing their pockets than the people. And that’s probably the biggest failure across the continent. For example, Mugabe keeps blaming the imperialists, but basically everyone knows that he’s the problem. Zimbabwe, the former bread basket of Africa, is now just an empty basket full of tired Mugabe rants. And people can’t eat those speeches, even though there are tons of them. Yet, he remains in power. That’s the problem.

Amidst these sentiments, my new exercise is of increasing importance. I need to retain a long term vision that things can, and will, fundamentally change. Not just for one man or woman, because that’s always been possible, but for masses of people. Otherwise, I could easily find myself dwelling in negativity, and that’s a waste of time and energy that could be used productively. And at the end of the day, time and energy is really all we have.