"To be fair to you, I think it would be best if this were my last class." And so in 1970, the only male student dropped out of one of the first college courses in women's studies. He told a friend in the class, "my being there restricted the conversation. It's best if people feel free to speak. In a few months or a few years, perhaps I can bring something to the dialogue."
I was that young student, just returned from a tour of duty with the U.S. Navy. The society I'd re-entered seemed as foreign as the Asia I had left. My world had been shaken in the spring of that year when four students at Kent State, an hour from my home, were slain as they marched for peace.
What a time. Who knew what would come of it, whether our society would even survive the violence and chaos? It's easy to see now that we'd survive, but back then?
Anger, even hatred, provided much of the fuel for the social movements of those years. For me, that women's studies class was a lasting lesson in how we can get energy from seeing what's wrong and what we cannot, will not, let stand. Much has been accomplished working from that stance.
But in the decades since, I've come to believe that it's hard to sustain social change that springs solely from anger and a sense of injustice, because that kind of energy cannot sustain us.
When we stand in anger, we blame and overwhelm people, ourselves as well as others, and make it more difficult for any of us to see another way to be. We wear ourselves out, as our nervous system sets itself for the stress of a fight. Or we resign ourselves to defeat and withdraw from the fray.
The more daunting we describe the problems, the more wrong we paint society, the less confidence is available to bring about the world we want.
As we've seen in these pages, a better path has begun to emerge. We now have the ingredients of strategies for social action that are more humane, more enlightened, more spiritually evolved, and even more effective. Righteous indignation may have provided the first impetus to act, but the world is different today.
Black South Africans certainly taught us this and more when they put aside hatred and retribution after apartheid, in favor of forgiveness. I was deeply moved to learn from one South African woman how strongly that spirit of reconciliation is held.
When she was a child, she told me, her parents were in a car accident in a remote area outside of Johannesburg. The first ambulances that responded left the scene when they found out that her parents were black. By the time a "black ambulance" arrived, it was too late. Both of her parents were dead. Amazingly, she is able to see a glimmer of value in that terrible loss. For she now recognizes its role in who she is--a person for whom forgiveness defines her life. And so I knew she truly meant it when she said to me, "We were, and are, all in this together."
Today we can spend a lot less energy on agitation. We can turn our attention to sustaining ourselves and others, especially when we learn to see that people are "with us" more than we might have thought. When we choose such a creative and appreciative vantage point, we elevate the most precious aspects of what it means to be human, and allow the fire of our ideals to burn brighter than ever.
Could this more mature idealism become the greatest legacy of the baby-boomers to the next generation?