“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’d just left. Four students at Kent State, an hour from my home, had just been killed as they marched for peace. My world was upside-down.

What a time. Who knew what would come of it, whether our society would even survive the violence and chaos?

Anger, even hatred, fueled the social movements of those years. That women’s studies class had taught me 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 years since, I’ve come to see that we can’t sustain social change 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 harder for any of us to see another way to be.

We wear ourselves out, as our nervous system sets itself for a fight. Or we resign ourselves to defeat and withdraw from the fray.

In fact, the more daunting we describe the problems and the more wrong we paint society, the less confidence we have to bring about the world we want.

A better path has emerged. We now have the ingredients for social action that is 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 showed us just how different — when they put aside hatred and retribution after apartheid, in favor of forgiveness. I was 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, her parents were dead.

Amazingly, she sees 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, appreciative vantage point, we elevate the most precious aspects of what it means to be human. And the fire of our ideals can burn brighter than ever.

It’s taken me living some years to get to this idea, so I’m glad to see some of today’s younger leaders already adopting this mindset.

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them.”
~ Barack Obama, in his first inaugural address

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