Satyagraha in the Digital Age: What can one individual do?
Carl Malamud, National Herald, July 8, 2017, Special 75-Year Commemorative Edition
Internet has provided our generation a unique opportunity to make knowledge free and accessible. The author, thwarted by Governments in US and India, shows us how.
Our world is in turmoil. Random violence and terror has spread to all corners of the globe, our world is facing a climate catastrophe if we do not act (and we are not acting), income inequality grows wider and hunger and famine continue to spread. What can one individual do when faced with such calamity?
The answer, I submit, lies in the teachings of those who are our leading lights, who fought for decades to right the wrongs they saw in the world. In India and America—the largest and greatest democracies in our modern world—we can look to them. In India, the teachings of Gandhi and Nehru and all the freedom fighters continue to inspire. In the United States, we can look to Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, and all the people who fought so long and hard for civil rights.
The key to action for us as individuals is persistence and focus. Persistence means that changing the world has to be more than a short Facebook moment or a tweet. Persistence means that it may take decades to right wrongs, to educate ourselves and educate our leaders. Educating ourselves is what Gandhi-ji taught his followers in South Africa and in the Congress in India, to focus on ethics, morals, and character. It is a lesson all people who aspire to lead today should absorb.
Focus is also one of the big lessons from Gandhi-ji and from King in the US. Pick something specific that matters and try to change it. Do something real. Make the goal specific: removal of the salt tax, the right to eat lunch at a counter, the right to attend a school, the right to vote in an election, the elimination of sharecropping.
For a decade, I have focused on one specific goal, enhancing the rule of law. John F Kennedy once said that if we make the means of peaceful revolution impossible, the violent means of revolution are inevitable. In a just society, in a
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