“People are depressed today because the world is devolving. We are not wrong to feel this way. Rather, we should be listening to the voice in all of us that’s saying: “Something is wrong here. Something is wrong.” Then we are awakened to the urgent call of history: that we must make it right.

Every problem emerges originally from a mindset, and every solution emerges from a mindset as well. The problem is not just that we have so many problems; the problem is that too many people feel numb to them, or powerless to fix them, or hopeless, or disillusioned.

Disillusionment, however, can be a good thing when it motivates us to mature. Becoming stripped of the illusion that “someone else” will fix our problems, we become aware that we ourselves must do it. Once we’re out there trying to make a difference, we start to feel that something different is possible.

The correct question is not, “Why do starvation, or genocide, or deep poverty exist?” The question is, “Why do we allow such things to exist?” The people who repudiate and stop such things share a common characteristic: they refuse to shut up. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

When I was young, there were specific issues we could rail against—the Vietnam War, lack of civil rights, gender inequality—and we did. The problem today is that there is more than just one war over here or one oppressive institution over there; those, we could fix.

Our problem now is vaguely all-encompassing, less limited to a particular effect and more an underlying blanket of cause. That overriding cause is the effective yet soulless mindset that’s the child of the new corporatized order, threatening to marginalize anyone who doesn’t play along with an increasingly destructive way of looking at the world.”

Excerpt From: Williamson, Marianne. “Tears to Triumph”