You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.
Interpretation
Taking responsibility is essential for enacting societal change.
This quote by Grace Lee Boggs emphasizes the importance of personal accountability and belonging when it comes to fostering change within society. It suggests that individuals must recognize their role and responsibility in the community to effectively contribute to its transformation.
In practice
During a community meeting, someone quoted this to inspire others to take action.
We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.
People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.
We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present.
How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?
Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Donβt get stuck in old ideas.
The struggle we're dealing with these days, which, I think, is part of what the 60s represented, is how do we define our humanity?
When the world is predictable you need smart people. _x000D_ When the world is unpredictable you need adaptable people.
Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.
CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally... Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.
Why are guns the only unregulated consumer products in America? We regulate toy guns and teddy bears, but we do not regulate a product that kills 4,600 children a year.
My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don't care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that - building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.
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