Jun 04 2009
Be The Change of Want You Want to See in the World
Rule #1: Change yourself.“You must be the change you want to see in the world.” A quote made famous by Gandhi, who lead India back to independence from the British in 1947, using only words and peace. In this post, Gandhi’s Top 10 Fundamentals for Changing the World by Hendrik Edberg, the blogger writes down 10 Gandhi’s beliefs in changing the world, followed by famous quotes from Gandhi himself.
This post overall, is telling you to be capable of changing yourself before you decide to change the world. Ghandi lead the people of India into standing up for themselves, for independence of their country. They fought peacefully to make a stand in what like they believed in and they wanted to see their country gain independence, and from all their hard work and effort they succeeded to change the world; by making their country independent.
According to Ghandi’s quote, “You must be the change you want to see in the world,” Ghandi himself has been a great change to the world. He led people to believing that you can achieve anything with peace, stop war, gain independence, standing up for what you believe in, and so on. If we wanted to change the world, we wouldn’t have to make as much effort as Ghandi had made since now there are more ways to connect to people like through the internet where your voices can be heard by many different ways like using facebook (and other social networking sites) email, twitter, or blogging, like this. All this is one click away, but generally everyone just takes this opprotunity for granted.
Ghandi’s philosophies relate to many issues we’ve been studying about in this year. In Rice Without Rain, Inthorn, the village headman made a stand to increase the farmers’ share of rice. Although he later died of infections, he had helped raise a petition on increasing the farmers’ share of rice so that other farmers wouldn’t be forced into giving the rice they needed to raise their village to the landlords. By reading Ghandi’s philosophies, it also links to our Connected World unit, where we have been focusing on how we could make the world a better place for everyone.
Imagine what Ghandi did, several decades ago. He was only one normal being, like any of us, and look at how much change he has made of the world. Now, imagine what one of us can do if we really tried, with all this new technology we have now, technology that people from the Ghandi times would never have the opprotunity to know about. And now, imagine what we can do as a group. It may not be easy to be the first person to start a petition, but somehow, you would eventually have your voice heard if you really tried. I want to take action in prolonging global warming (if not stopping it, but eventually it will happen) but if I only say what I want, and not putting any effort into stopping the situation, then no one would think I’m trustworthy enough to follow because it’s useless to follow a hypocrite. But on the other hand, if I could start a chain mail or a blog to get people to follow me, then it would make a great impact on the world and what I want might actually start to happen. To be honest, I’m not going to spend all the freetime making bulletins and posters and organizing dates to turn off the lights and all, because it’s not my job to do, yet at least. But what I can do now is post things on the internet to help the environment like what Hendrik Edberg has done for the article on Ghandi’s philosophies on changing the world. To change the world, you have to prove to the world that you are capable of changing the world by making an effort and trying your best to stand up for what you believe in. Relating back to Ghandi’s quote, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
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