CHANGE AND MAKERS OF IT

CHANGE is a racket.

Every self-aggrandizing rascal wants it. Not wanting it makes you a problem: a grumpy Luddite grasping after just-moved cheese. Change is normal. Opposing it, querying it, marks you out. You’re “not on board” and other equally categorical put-downs.

We hire change managers. Change agents. Change specialists. We aspire to “be” the change. Change is inevitable. Healthy. It’s what a movie character once famously quipped of greed: change is good. Google drowns you in inspirational quotes about it.

No one lists “status quo manager” on their CV. What CEO, ever, has started their inaugural board meeting promising less change than their predecessor? Change is just so good. Except when it isn’t.

Five centuries into Europeans’ endless occupation of the Northern Hemisphere, Indigenous Peoples may be forgiven a lack of enthusiasm when it comes to change. As we teeter on the brink of climatological apocalypse, scientists and the Sierra Club might also have reasonable doubts about centuries of frothy, thoughtless “progress.”

Shucking out democracy to reckless, plutocratic profit has worked brilliantly for, well, about one whole per cent of us. Privatized elder care has been equally grand, save for those residents left to suffer or die during the pandemic by thoughtless facility employees and their cost-conscious employers. Affordable housing seekers, student debtors, and the pension-less might take structural or industrial change with rather more vinegar than your average sports star or entertainment icon.

If change per se isn’t the absolute corker your investment guru might have it, let’s pare it back. Put differently, and stripped of its self-serving hyperbole, what’s change really all about, Charlie Brown?

First, even in our Great Age of Narcissism, real change is about compassion, followed by action. It’s lodged in you, but exercised outside of you. It’s in how you see your world, its creatures, and their plight. It calls you to do something. If not social justice exactly, then surely justice, or at least the art of being just. Perhaps radically, real change separates action from eventual outcome, focussing on the immediate, the good, the impactful. It eschews personal gains, comforts, or kudos in favour of the cumulative benefits of serial kindness. If it were easy, more of us would do it. But it isn’t, so we don’t.

This is the kind of change that breeds charity, empathy, and aid without expectation of return. The change that feeds, nourishes, and values others, as and how you find them. Basic. From the heart. One gesture at a time. It is change for civility, decency, sensitivity, respect.

Second, real change is about community. You can do it retail or wholesale, but either way, it’s about the neighbourhood (to borrow from Sesame Street): yours, ours, or someone else’s. Lisa Browne, Memorial’s vice-president (advancement and external relations), nailed this in her “Last Word” column in a previous Luminus. In paraphrase, it’s the holistic impetus to help others to enjoy “healthy, safe and inclusive lives.” Scaled for means, time, and energy, this is the kind of change that builds libraries, food banks, and schools. The kind that privileges health over wealth, openness over fear, sharing above hoarding.

This sort of change inspires voluntarism, and volunteers. Lifetimes of public service. Vocationalism. It’s the extra-curricular devotee, the communitarian, the organizer. The rescuer of lost languages. It’s the knuckles on doors for heart disease. Scout leaders. Crosswalk attendants. It is change for jointness, for faith in the uniqueness of our shared physical and imaginary spaces. It is a penchant for optimism, for hope, despite the dead certainty that nothing good comes easy.

And third, real change is about character. It’s about having a moral compass. Integrity. Trustworthiness. At times, charisma; at others, determined quietude. A philosophy which, while enervating, is not exclusive, or abusive. Often, and always at the extremes, it’s about courage. Non-conformity. Non-compliance. Boldness. Endurance. The opposite of self-serving, it often entails self-sacrifice. Principle entwined with practice. As per author Christopher Hitchens’ book about mentoring, Letters to a Young Contrarian, courage. It is both inexplicable and everywhere.

This kind of change is where the great humanitarians live. The anti-racists. The suffragettes. Democracy’s great warriors. Malala Yousafzai is here. Gandhi. A single student in front of a large tank in a Chinese square. Legions of the ordinary, linked by action, by intent, and by the full knowledge of what might be arrayed against them. And acting anyway.

Change is a racket.

Except, my friends, when it isn’t.