A trusted colleague of mine sometimes says: ‘Nothing changes if nothing changes’.
But change always involves taking a risk. I’ve made fairly big changes in my life because I was lucky to have the wherewithal to take a bit of a chance and be surrounded by a loving wife, family and extended family that believed in me and supported me through those changes.
Is there a time in one’s life when one can pinpoint a change, or an epiphany, like Saul on the road to Damascus? I don’t really know the answer to that question. Indeed my arguments elsewhere will suggest that a succession of small oft-repeated events usually have a lot more power in effecting change than one big event.
However, that which we remember vividly is probably of some importance in terms of determining the when of change, the tipping point, as I will also be describing elsewhere!
My work on radio and radar when I was stationed in Baldonnel Air Base near Dublin necessitated occasional visits to Shannon Airport (or Ballygireen, which is near Shannon, to be exact) and one day I was on a train from Limerick to Limerick Junction when I picked up a copy of a magazine that someone else had left behind. This magazine, (an English magazine called Resurgence, (now online of course) was very interesting to me as I was always (and still am) interested in the environment, cycling to work, growing my own, making country wines, hill-walking etc.
It’s hard to believe that this little event first got me thinking about leaving my public service job and heading into (what was to me) the unknown of the community sector. I found the magazine so interesting and congruent with my views on the world that I became a subscriber.
Long before global warming was topical, Resurgence (and other publications that I came across through it) were warning about the dangers of reliance on fossil fuels, risks posed to the health of humans by big pharma, how corporations and governments are in each other’s pockets, corruption at high levels in society, the link between nuclear power and the military industrial complex, the difference between non-violence and peace, (really eye-opening for me – that), the power of the arms industry and the apparent indifference of the system in the face of serious challenges to our humanity.
Another aspect of the magazine that intrigued me was that it, generally, contained more positive news than negative. This was all very new to me – and very exciting at the time!
Exposed to all this new thinking, I came to believe that humans could do a lot better in respect of resolving conflict than going to war to kill each other. This is not that easy to argue for. As a former mentor of mine, Colonel E. D. Doyle, argued, there’s always an army in a country, and if it’s not the army of the country itself – it’s an occupying army. And people will justifiably say that the reality is that if we are attacked we have to defend ourselves, and we need a Defence Forces to do that ………
Agreed!
However, through reading books, magazines, articles etc. that I never was exposed to in school, (or anywhere else, really, up to that time in my life), I became aware that the principal causes of wars in the world are injustice, exploitation, colonialism, inequality, and the vast majority of people do not want, and gain absolutely nothing from war [1].
As a result I began to be more interested in being part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Now, living in, and enjoying the benefits of the Western World, many of which are due to our economic exploitation of poorer countries, I know that I cannot be totally part of the solution. But at least by leaving the Army I would have the freedom to choose, and could allow myself to lean strongly in the direction of the solution if I so wished. And through it all I noticed something about myself.
My heroes began to change.
In physics I had come across phenomena known as matter and anti-matter. I was thinking of this one day and I began to think about who matters to me and who doesn’t. I know that this is a bit of a play on words but I like words and connections between words so I thought about it a small bit.
In my new reading I discovered an entire world out there exemplified by people like Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, the black women in the 1950’s who defied apartheid in the USA and sat on seats on buses that were reserved for white people. And one day I read about a man in India, who, concerned about the environment, planted 100,000 trees. He just went out and did it himself. These, I thought, are the people who really matter – to me anyway.
Who, then, are the anti-matter people? Which people don’t matter? Well – I have plenty anti-matter people but I won’t mention them here!
On my journey I discovered something else about myself. That is, in order to be part (albeit a very small part – but a part nonetheless) of the solution I had to let go of my ego.
What I mean is, because the solution certainly won’t happen in my lifetime, being part of it involves believing in my own limitations, and also humanity itself. In fact, rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that part of the problem is that we want too much to happen too quickly – and in our lifetime if possible.
That belief has implications for this website – and how I present it in general, in the sense that I much prefer change to be like healthy growth, slow and sustainable, than the opposite; i.e. too fast, too much too soon – and ultimately unsustainable.
Growth will happen if conditions are right – and if not, so be it. Maybe they’ll be right some other time, or maybe they’ll never be!
This is simply my gift to the world of protection of vulnerable people, and really, as I state above, it is an invitation.
[1]. I deal with this in more detail in the Chapter on Power and Control in Society.