Why Me?

I’ve been wrestling with this essay for about a week and a half, not really wanting to write it because I know that it’s aimed at me as much as it is any of you. But, the basis of this post is “if this is a blog about changing the future, why do all of the posts seem to be about changing me?”

Why me? Why do I have to change? I want to bring about world peace. I want wars to end, for hunger to be wiped out, for racism to stop, and for everyone to live in harmony. I want everyone else to change. I’m fine, or at the very least doing the best that I can. I donate money (and perhaps time). I recycle. I am polite to meter maids and small children. What’s so wrong with me that we have to talk about how I have to change? Why can’t we talk about them? They’re the ones that have to change.

I’ll tell you why we aren’t talking about them – the ones who don’t bother picking up after themselves, the bosses who make racist jokes, the police officers who let off pretty women with just a warning while others get tickets, the anti-gay protestors, the vandals and desecrators. We aren’t talking about how to change them because we can’t change them. We simply can’t.

There are a lot of things we can do, but we can’t change other people. We can change their actions for a short amount of time. We can hold a gun to their heads and say “do this or die” and most will do what we want. We can withhold sex or allowances or invitations to our house or our good will. We can nag and threaten and bully. But what does that get us? A temporary change in their behavior, which they will change back once we stop actively forcing them to alter their ways. We wouldn’t have changed the people themselves.

People do change, and people do influence other people to change, but not against the other’s will. And it’s a whole lot easier to change by example than by force or coercion.

If a celebrity did a commercial on TV against smoking and you saw her later in the news smoking away, would you listen to her?

If your aunt Mabel gained 100 pounds of weight over the past year and then yelled at you for having a second piece of cake, would you listen to her?

If your sister told you not to go out with rough men and don’t let them treat you like dirt while she’s covering up her latest bruise from the fourth boyfriend she’s had in six months, would you listen to her?

No, most likely not. Because the integrity of a hypocrite is low. Because we don’t listen to hypocrites unless they’re telling us something we were already prepared to hear, whether it came from a hypocrite, a sincere person, or a fortune cookie. But someone who’s sincere, someone who also doesn’t smoke, doesn’t overeat, and doesn’t let men smack them around – that’s someone that we’re more likely to listen to.

There’s a story about Ghandi where a woman asked him to tell her son not to eat sugar. She went to him, because her son would listen to a wise man like Ghandi. Ghandi told her to come to him in two weeks with her son. In two weeks, they came back, and Ghandi told the boy to stop eating sugar. The mother asked him, if that’s all he was going to do, why couldn’t he do that two weeks ago? Ghandi replied that two weeks ago, he was still eating sugar himself.

This is why we’re looking at ourselves. This is why we are improving our own lives and our own futures. It is because the only way to get others to decide to change or at least to prepare them for change later, is by example.

And that can suck. Because it’s easier to try to change others than to change yourself. At least at first. But change is also contagious. As you change the small things, the big things become easier. And as you change yourself, you’ll find that others around you change – or you’ll discover that they won’t change and you no longer want to be the type of person who enjoys their company.

That last part is one of the more difficult things about change, and one of the big reasons why some people don’t change. They don’t want to face the big problems of their lives, so they keep around the smaller problems to focus on. They distract themselves from their spouses’ cheating (or just apathy) by concentrating on their dirty house, and they keep it dirty so that they don’t have the time or energy to “see” the cheating. They say they want a clean house, but deep down, they want their marriage more, and to not have to face the problems in their marriage, they have other problems instead.

Change yourself first, and others will follow. Perhaps not the ones that you are currently with, but others. It is, unfortunately, the only effective way. But you’re not alone. You can trust me on that.