our problem with change
Change is great, and sometimes it seems like we are making big steps in changing society for the better, but are we really? There are new laws all the time, but if no one pays any attention to these laws they don’t really make a difference, do they?
A law being made is only a surface level change, not a change that actually makes a change. It’s like dropping an ice cube into the ocean, for a short time it may affect the temperature of the water right around where you dropped the ice cube, but after a while everything goes back to normal and it is almost as if that ice cube was never even there. That seems to be what happens with some laws and social changes in our society, in the beginning they have a big impact but after a while everyone forgets about it and moves on to the next problem they want to try and tackle.
Does anyone remember Kony 2012? Probably not. But think back to how many people were talking about that when it went viral? People were really fired up and ready to make a change, but after a while they forgot about it, and nothing ever happened, no change was ever made. This seems to be a pattern, and not a good one, changes get made, and don’t get me wrong- it’s great, but after a while everything just goes back to normal and nothing happens, nothing changes at all.
We have to worry that this will be what happens with the environmental movement that is currently starting to take place. Will people soon move on to some other problem and completely forget about the environmental problems they were once set on fixing? Or will we finally be able to stick to what we start and actually fix this problem?
If we do want to stick with this problem what are the things we need to change? What went wrong in the past that made these amazing movements suddenly die and be replaced by something else? Do the problems we are trying to fix suddenly become too serious and scary so we back off and focus on something else until it also becomes too scary to actually face and fix?
In 2010, Invisible Children, the company who started the Kony 2012 campaign, had a revenue of $8.2 million, in 2012 their revenue was $31.94 million. Their video received over 100 million hits within the first week of being posted. This all sounds great, and it is, but we have to look deeper at what happened, I mean it was all so famous but only for a short time. People gave donations and shirts and bracelets and all sorts of stuff, but there was very little action past spending money.
Maybe it’s the fact the people don’t seem to believe they can actually make a difference themselves, so they just give money to someone else to do it. This is a mindset that we need to change in our society. People cannot go on believing they can’t make a change by themselves, because they can. Money is not going to be what fixes the problems our society faces, yes it helps, but what is really going to fix our problems is people. We need people to come together and create ideas and plans that will fix things. And we need people to stick to these plans; we can’t back down when it gets hard or scary. The problems we are facing are hard and scary, but as a whole we are bigger than them, we can beat them. But we wont be able to beat them if we back down, the problems will win if this is what we do with every problem.
Change does seem scary sometimes, but when you really think about, no matter what happens, whether we face the problem or back down from it, things are going to change. When we back down from a problem, the change is probably going to be bad, but when we buckle down and stand up to the big bad problem that we really are scared of, the change that comes will be a positive one, in more ways than one. Once we begin standing up to every problem that faces our society we will get stronger as a whole, and there will no longer be a problem that we turn our backs on out of fear, because problems will no longer be something that frighten us, instead they will be a challenge that our society learns to face as a whole.