If you’ve been following the bouncing ball, you know I’ve been writing a weekly series of posts on the topic of agency for the past 10 weeks. In weeks seven through ten, I wrote about the celebratory progress we’ve been making in our weekly writing workshop, Finding Your Voice.
As life would have it, I was sick last week. We postponed our Finding Your Voice session. And I missed the deadline for publishing my weekly post on Monday of this week. But I’m back now. (You can decide if that’s good news or bad.) I don’t want to break my streak. And since we postponed our workshop session, I don’t have that to write about. I do, however, have agency to write about.
One of my LinkedIn connections — a person who had no idea I was like a ravenous Pit Bull with a five-pound porterhouse steak about the topic of agency — shared this video with me:
That, my friends, is agency in action.
Here are just two examples:
- “Regardless of our religion, regardless of our skin color, regardless of our cultures, there are things that bring us together on common ground. That’s freedom of speech. We want to make sure we’re protecting the innocence of our children. We want freedom of religion. There are some things that bring us together.” (Angela Stanton King)
- “If you want to know what conservatism means, it means conservation of the idea of the individual — that each and every one of us has inherent gifts that we are meant to give this world, and that deserves to be protected.” (Sonnie Johnson)
If we have full senses of our own agency — if we have self-faith, confidence in our abilities, the conviction that we’re sovereign individuals, and the determination to use that self-faith, those abilities, and that sovereignty to accomplish what we want to accomplish — we’re going to change our lives. In changing our lives — in starting with ourselves — we’re going to change the world.
I’ll leave you with this thought: A person whose political philosophy I won’t divulge labelled the conference at which that video was recorded as lunatic. If that’s lunatic, we’ve come a long way, baby. And the direction we’ve traveled is not good.
Let’s set a more positive, constructive course.
