Stray Thoughts 4 - So How Exactly Did We Get Here

Growing up, I was an avid reader of Amar Chitra Katha comic books (in the absence of other entertainment, one forgives terrible paper quality). As I flipped through those pages, I couldn't help but wonder what made these people - who looked exactly like me - such absolute badasses. How did they walk the same roads, eat the same food, and bargain just as aggressively as I do, yet end up so distinct? Was I missing something? How is one marked for such greatness, and why don’t I see it around me anymore? Has greatness become as obsolete as skinny jeans and men wearing three-quarter pants (gladly)? If so, I have seriously missed my ticket.

In the summer of 1911, a middle-aged nurse in New York likely asked herself similar questions (minus the skinny jeans commentary) as she made her fifth midwifery call to the suburbs. The sight of a home struggling to hold itself together, let alone feed another newborn, moved her enough to take up arms against the clergy in a battle that became the "Every child a wanted child" movement. Margaret Sanger became a voice for those who had none, or were too young to speak. For the first time, public contraception, abortion rights, and child protection entered the halls of power, sparking what we now call the liberal movement. Interestingly, in 1992- decades after the movement met its primary goals - the Justice Department noticed a peculiar, steady drop in violent crime. Subsequent investigations offered the final feather in Sanger's cap: modern family planning had done more to curb crime than state enforcement ever could.

On December 17, 2010, Tarek al-Tayeb Mohammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor harassed by police for simply trying to make a living, likely faced that same internal questioning before self-immolating. His act posthumously ignited the ‘Arab Spring,’ arguably giving the 21st century its own defining set of revolutions. TIME Magazine named ‘The Protester’ its Person of the Year, as the Spring swept across North Africa and continued to inspire revolutions throughout the decade, right up to recent uprisings in Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, and Sudan.

Nicolae Ceaușescu, a slick-haired communist, likely thought he was marking himself for glory on October 14, 1967, when he signed Decree 770. Intended to boost Romania's "productivity" and labor access, the decree outlawed birth control and abortion while restricting women's rights to education and work. Long story short, over the next 20 years, Romania’s capital productivity dipped by one-tenth, while the only things that went up were "reproductivity" and poverty (it rhymes for a reason). Riddled with debt and crime, Romania trotted into chaos. In 1989, in a final bout for his throne, Ceaușescu appeared before an enraged public - a generation of deprived kids known as the "770 Babies," who now had muscles and guns. In his bid for greatness, he lost his objectivity, and shortly after, his life.

Some might argue that the Amar Chitra Katha analogy doesn't fit modern change-makers - that today's heroes often act from a bubble of relative comfort rather than ancient asceticism. While many in those comic books may have subscribed to giving up worldly pleasures for devotion, I am certain there are just as many contributions by those who simply acted on what they felt was right, creating a massive ripple effect. Change is rarely a single-act play; it wouldn't reach the grand stage without the curtain droppers, the lighting folks, and for that matter, even the audience.