It’s hard sometimes, you know?
You work hard, you take time to seek out understanding, you make the effort to connect, you try to understand. You read, you think, you pray, you hope. You think that you’re doing good and also doing well.
And then sometimes you just come up short. Your efforts don’t pay off. Your vision is crushed. The thing you hoped for simply never comes to pass.
It seems that your effort was wasted. That you were doing the wrong things, all along. Nothing really was real, after all.
As it happens every time, the people with the power win, again and again. The old ways are still the only ways. Power and greed are centered, people and communities are crushed. Words and love and reason and dreams accomplished nothing except to deliver you into foolish hopes.
I see you in this. The work of change, of justice, of compassion, is damn hard work, and it is greatly opposed by the people in power as well as the people living in the thrall of that power and the fear of that power being turned on them. The greedy and powerful aren’t enough in numbers to do anything without the millions of people who give in to them because what else can they do? Their own dreams have been crushed; their only tool of survival is to give in and abandon hope, like so many around them and before them.
But I want to tell you a story of a very good man—one of millions, really, but one who stood out to me—who had the exact same experience, over and over again, who never really got to that “promised land.” Yet he persevered to the end of his life, believing.
I first met Representative John Lewis maybe four or five years ago when he was on a book tour. I was in an audience of perhaps a thousand, entertained by his stories and anecdotes that he’d shared a thousand times before.
But he said something in that moment that was directed to me, up there in the nosebleed section of the community hall.
Make good trouble.
Not “go out and do great things.” Not “push your way forward.” Not “dare greatness.” (All of which are fine in their own way.
He just said what met my need in the moment. Make good trouble.
Now afterward I got to meet him up close. We talked for a bit, and embraced, and that was that. Then after the meeting, while I was waiting for my bus, he saw me from across the street, came over to me to talk some more.
I do not know why that happened. A thousand people in the crowd, all who dispersed, and then he singled me out.
But it meant something. It was the assurance, maybe, that I could make good trouble and he expected me to do so. 🙂
I’m good at causing trouble. I have an entire lifetime of hijinks behind me, of being that kid who was too clever by half, who disrupted classes and meetings and assemblies. For the fun of it. For the hell of it.
Make good trouble?
That clicked. I can’t go out and do great things. But I think I can go out and do good things, and I think I can make good trouble by doing good things that disrupt power and expose greed and tear down masks and walls.
A whole lot of us have been trying so very hard to make good happen, and that is admirable. But it’s so very hard. So much of our efforts are opposed, blocked, and overturned.
Maybe it’s time to keep that heart of doing good, but to push into making trouble with that good.
Disrupt conversations by pushing for good.
Disrupt harmful actions by standing up for good.
Be that person who isn’t in it for the social acceptance, but for the awareness of the public good.
I’m not sure what this means for you. I have some ideas what it means for me. And I am quite sure that there isn’t a recipe in here for “success.”
That’s not what “making good trouble” means, though. It means stirring things up so that we do not become complacent about our situation and resigned to injustice.
It’s something anyone can do. I can do it. You can do it.
Let’s do it.