The traditional view is that "change must start at the top." So we wait for our leaders to act, even though we can see what is called for and we know what we want to happen. It's worth remembering that historically it has been the dispossessed--from Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriots to the Polish shipbuilders--who have brought about the greatest social changes.
As Vaclav Havel, first president of the Czech Republic, once put it, "Small, futile moral actions can bring down an empire." Indeed, one of the sparks that set off the peaceful 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia was the jailing of a rock band over freedom of expression.
Certainly there are forces operating, tailwinds that give lift to our cause. Still, the precipitating moment often takes the efforts of only a small group of people, as Margaret Mead observed.
Sometimes that small group is children. New seeds and cultivation methods had been around for many years in early 20th-century America, but farmers weren't open to using them until an enterprising extension agent from the government suggested to the children of farmers that they ask their parents for a small corner of a field to experiment. "How did you ever get such corn yields from that same land?" the farmer asked his children. "I can ask the county agent who taught us to stop by," the kids replied. And in that creative idea, which in time became the 4-H Clubs, an agricultural revolution was born.
A century later, in a very different world, Russell Simmons speaks to youth, to those his own age (49), and to all of us when he says our personal commitments count for more than we think. "If you see yourself as powerless, you are," says Simmons, "if you see yourself as powerful, you are. If you see the world as a great place, it is; if you see the world as a place that sucks where no one has any opportunities, it is."
As a teenager, Simmons was a drug dealer. He's now a successful record producer (sometimes called the godfather of hip-hop).
He says he's inspired to act when he sees young people taking the future into their own hands, "when I see them registering to vote, when I see them changing laws and cheering about the laws, when I see people telling me they are inspired to be an activist themselves because they see what can be done collectively, when I see them becoming leaders on their own."
"Voting is a statement to yourself that you see yourself as powerful and able to make the world better," says Simmons of the effect that our actions can have on our confidence in our own power.