Gandhi’s Salt March wasn’t about salt or marching, nor is my work about solar or living off-grid.
I can tell people consistently misunderstand what I’m doing from the questions they ask: how long does it take to charge the battery or what do I do for toothbrushes. Or they say it’s harder for people with kids.
In 1930, Gandhi protested the British monopoly on selling salt. Did he attack them with weapons? No, they were too powerful. He marched to the sea, got some salt from evaporated sea water, sold it, and showed that the British had made illegal something anyone should be able to do freely. Hundreds of thousands participated in the march. Millions of Indians followed him in selling salt, making a mockery of the British law, which deserved mockery, and garnering global attention and support.
Gandhi’s Salt March was neither about salt, nor marching. Those were his tools, but it was about liberating a nation from colonial rule.
Actually, it was about more than liberating a colonized nation. It was about reforming a colonial empire to live by values it claimed to espouse.
Actually, it was about more than reforming an empire. It was about elevating humanity to live with more love and compassion.
That said, it still manifested in salt and marching, but a journalist who reported on the Salt March what shoes Gandhi wore or how long it took to evaporate the sea water missed the point. It was about all these layers of meaning at once.
Likewise, I’m working on liberating eight billion people and countless cultures from being dominated and deprived of their freedom and liberty, made hopeless, helpless, desperate, anxious, and so on. Also sick, insecure, and unsafe.
People who only see my battery miss that I’m working on freedom, liberty, health, safety, and security. I suppose they’d think the Montgomery Bus Boycott was about walking and exercise. Sadly, people focus on toilet paper and myopic nonsense.
On another note, I haven’t linked to my collection of memes I created in a while: Imagine well-known people responding how we do to the environment. I recommend checking them out. Here’s the Gandhi one:
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