We Can Transform
“Every human being is endowed with the innate capacity to transform.”
We forget this, sometimes. You see so many people trapped in the rhetoric of helplessness - ‘The world will never change… I’m just one person… I can’t do anything… I might as well do nothing.’ Litsin has written many powerful pieces about her frustration in the face of such defeatism, and I completely agree with her. Because I think we dangerously underestimate our capacity to transform the world around us.
I believe in the human being as a natural agent for change. Every action of the free individual has the capacity to transform her surroundings, for good or for ill. (obviously, in this context, i mean the good kind)
Yes, the actions of other individuals can limit our ability to transform. If you’re in solitary confinement, with no contact whatsoever with the outside world, your potential for change is vastly reduced. But even then, you’ve got your prayers. As long as you’re not out cold, you’ve got something. And anyone who can read this at the moment has a very great deal they can do, more than they might think.
People say, oh, the system will never change. Yes, it’ll never change, as long as you believe it never will. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You don’t believe it will change, you don’t do anything to achieve change, and as a result, change never happens. Change starts with you, and ends with collective action. But we’ll never get enough people, unless we start with our own selves.
People say, oh, even if I write, it won’t change anything. Wrong. The act of writing, of challenging an action you disagree with, that’s already transforming the landscape in your own small way. Edward Said called the status quo ‘the normalised quiet of power’. Silence is the preferred state of those in love with power. Any act which punctures that normalised quiet, be it as small as a blog post, or as big as a huge demonstration in the heart of KL, are blows to the very heart of power. And don’t forget - every voice that speaks out adds another to the whole.
People say, oh, I don’t know how to write, or I don’t like writing, or I want to get my hands dirty, not just write, but there’s nothing I can do. If you don’t want to write, there’s a world of things that you can do. People say there’s nothing you can do in Malaysia, but that’s a lie. You can log on to idealist.org. You can be like Michelle, and volunteer at Rumah Solehah. You can do a HIV awareness programme, and raise funds for Rumah Pengasih. You can set up a tuition centre for poor kids living in city slums, or join one already existing. You can get your alumni association to start a scholarship fund for poor students to go to university.
You can set up a soup kitchen, in a city full of the less, but without one soup kitchen. You can grab all the children’s books you see at the next garage sale, and donate them to a kampung kids who don’t have any books (especially after the gradual demise of moving libraries). You can join a trip to Perlis, and help rural schoolchildren improve their English.
What some don’t seem to realise is that transformation doesn’t start with big changes, it starts with small ones. You start with changing your own routine, and putting more ‘transformation time’ in your schedule. If you spend a few hours a week at an old folks’ home, for those few hours, you’re transforming someone’s life. If you give a homeless guy 3 pounds for him to spend the night in the shelter, you’ve transformed his life for a night.
Then as you go along, it starts to build up. Instead of just paying for him to go into a shelter, maybe you want to try and start one up yourself. Maybe instead of buying 5 books a month for that kampung school, you want your whole neighbourhood to buy 50 books a month for them.
At the same time, you start to ask questions. Why do we have so many homeless? If they’re unemployed, why are so many people unemployed? If they’re drug addicts, why aren’t our Pusat Serenti helping them? Why isn’t the school system teaching our kids better English? And you begin agitating, together with others, for change on a big scale, and those ‘big’ transformations are finally in sight.
It’s the same thing with corruption. Just because our leaders are doing it, just because the neighbour down the road does it, doesn’t mean we pay RM50 duit kopi the next time we get stopped for speeding. We start by choosing not to bribe, and not to take bribes. And then we go on to holding others to account, including through the ballot box.
The system isn’t easy to transform. But it can happen, if enough people care. And that starts with change in our very own lives. This is the example set by the Prophets - they set out trying to change systems by living lives of change themselves. And from their actions the ripples of change spread through their peoples, and are still being felt today.
But the initial choice to act has to come from inside us. Don’t fool ourselves into thinking that the system is the greatest lock on our transformative potential - unless our personal liberty’s been robbed, the only barriers to action are the ones we put there ourselves.
Take the initiative today. Take action. Beat the system. Transform our world.
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