The Power of One

The revolution in Egypt, following the example of Tunisia just weeks before, showed once again the power of individuals fired by a powerful idea whose time had come. By the time it had made the international news, the revolution had swelled into the millions flocking into Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and, as the old cliché goes, the Middle East will never be the same.

Today’s New York Times had a front page story on the two or three individuals who worked with their counterparts in Tunisia and Bosnia before that to foment and spark the Egyptian revolution.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html?hp

But, who were those others before them who helped create the tipping point that made the revolutions in Tunisia and Eqypt eventually possible? We’ll never know them by name, but they made a difference. Just as we’ll never know the unnamed individuals who paved the way for Rosa Parks whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus in 1955 sparked the Montgomery Bus Strike and the burgeoning civil rights movement. Parks was not the first to stand up for her rights under the same circumstances, but she became the tipping point that released a pent up frustration that finally spilled over into action.

The movement actually started decades before, as described by Isabel Wilkerson in her Pulitzer-Prize winning The Warmth of Other Suns, with the great migration of Blacks escaping the Jim Crow South before World War I and continuing until 1970. Some six million Blacks who left the South over those six decades, hoping to find freedom in the North and West, ended up being bitterly disappointed, but they changed the social, political, and economic face of America and helped create the climate for Brown v Board of Education, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement.

Again, except for those few individuals singled out in The Warmth of Other Suns, we’ll never know by name those brave souls who at the risk of their lives were the first to pick up and head into an unknown North and West to escape what had finally become intolerable. But, they were critical to the gradual evolution of America.

So, when we start thinking that it’s impossible for one person to make a difference, we are reminded of stories like the one my long-time friend Jim Burns sent me recently. It’s about a freshman in high school who sees a new, geeky kid on the block being bullied and comes to help him out and befriends him. During high school, they became fast friends and at their graduation ceremony, the geeky kid, who is the class valedictorian, told the story of his friend who came to his rescue years before. He went on to say he was headed home to kill himself that same day, but this single act of courage and kindness changed his mind.

None of us may ever have the chance to make that level of difference in another person’s life, but we can all make a difference in our own small way. As George Eliot observed in her masterful novel Middlemarch:

“For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Gerald E. Lavey