well-behaved women seldom make history
Here’s another in a series of posts featuring wisdom ripped from the history books that, for whatever reason, speaks to me.
I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.
These, of course, are the words of Clara Barton, best known for organizing the American Red Cross, but also one of those wonderful historical rabble-rousers with her hands in everything from the women’s suffrage to the civil rights movement; one of those great people who inspired that bumper sticker I shamelessly used as the title for this post.
I’m a big fan of the sentiment expressed in her words; too many of the world’s problems, large or small, personal or public, are the result of people being too hide-bound by tradition or precedent to even conceive of the idea that they might be able to do something to change things for the better.
I can only hope that we all might aspire to look at the world through that lens, challenging the status quo where we see things like inequality and injustice, regardless of how entrenched the current ways of doing things are.
