“Waiting on the World to Change”

Ceremony of the Flags
Beverley J. Pitts
October 11, 2007

If there's anything we can all agree on, it's the temptation to wait for the world to change. Maybe that's because everything's always in such a mess. We are hopeful, but we are overwhelmed. It's hard to decide which situation is the most desperate or most dangerous. Violence in the Middle East? Global warming and climate change? The HIV-AIDS pandemic? There's just too much going wrong in too many places. What can we possibly do about it?

Answering that question happens to be one of the things college is for.

The title of John Mayer's song "Waiting on the World to Change"is the theme of today's event. It drives the question as to why we tend to wait instead of engaging ourselves in change.

The song has been described as "an apology for his apathetic generation." It may be that the song also is a statement about how very difficult it is to make change when we are overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems.

Here are some of Mayer's lyrics: "We're all misunderstood. / They say we stand for nothing and there's no way we ever could. / Now we see everything that's going wrong / with the world and those who lead it. / We just feel like we don't have the means / to rise above and beat it. / So we keep waiting / waiting on the world to change."

But we know waiting won't work either. Guess what happens when we wait for the world to change? It gets worse. When we wait for the world to change, we get a humanitarian crisis like that in the Darfur region in western Sudan, with hundreds of thousands of casualties, ethnic cleansing, genocide.

We get homelessness in downtown New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. We get a situation like that in Indianapolis in the Phoenix Apartments, a hopeless and violent environment you may have read about in the Indianapolis Star this past week.

English philosopher Edmund Burke said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Imagine a world without Habitat for Humanity, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, church mission programs, Christel House schools, university international work projects.

The individuals who work on behalf of these and countless organizations like them didn't sit back and wait for a level playing field or for the powers that be to suddenly offer them a political voice. They have identified problems in the world and resolved to work to make a difference, sometimes one by one, person to person.

When we wait for the world to change, we don't get a changed world — unless we are talking about change for the worse. We get instead an infinite number of seemingly impossible situations in every realm of human life: politics, religion, culture, the environment.

One of the beautiful things about being at a university is that is where most of us learn the skills to lead — in other words, how to do something. It's where we learn about earlier efforts throughout history to change the course of events, to improve society.

It's where we learn what worked, and what didn't, and why. It's where we meet one another and learn about a world bigger than our own.

It's even where we realize that we can, in fact, make a difference, and that making a difference doesn't necessarily mean that we have to make massive changes or create a new political agenda, although those are important too.

We change the world a little when we vote in each election. We change the world a little when we volunteer for a local food pantry or teach art to inner-city kids.

We change the world a little when we join a faith-based mission trip. We certainly change the world a little when we become personal friends with someone from a different part of the world. We even change the world when we go about our private and professional lives in a way that is honest, and ethical, and capable.

That is why our motto at the University of Indianapolis is "Education for Service,"because we know it is individuals who change the world.

It's why our mission statement calls for the University to, and I quote, "prepare its graduates for effective, responsible, and articulate membership in the complex societies in which they live and serve, and for excellence and leadership in their personal and professional lives."

American journalist Dorothy Thompson once observed that "Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism"[unquote].

But we are optimistic about all of you--Generation Q as columnist Tom Friedman calls you. As he says in today's New York Times, members of "Generation Q are quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad. You will light the fire.

So, while we're waiting for the world to change, let's roll up our sleeves, and get busy.