People need dramatic examples

People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy. – Bruce Wayne, The Dark Knight

Steve Jobs could endearingly be referred to as a passionate guy. Known for his fits of rage, he would often swing into wild tirades over even seemingly small issues. At age 26, Jobs never had to another day of work in his life. He had just made $256 million from the initial public offering of Apple Computer, but for some reason, he was still hell-bent on perfection. As every Apple employee came to know pretty quickly, no matter what happened, there would be no separating Steve for long from his life’s deepest treasure.

It’s important to be clear, though, what I mean by “his treasure.” I’m not referring to additional riches… he was only moderately interested in that… and it wasn’t even Apple itself that kept him going. Every fiber in Steve Jobs’ body was driven by his now famous desire to “make a dent in the universe” – a notion which drove him and all of his employees to greater heights than any of them ever knew were possible. When Jobs convinced John Scully, then president of Cocoa-Cola, to join the budding Apple as its CEO, he did it by asking Scully if he wanted to sell flavored sugar water for the rest of his life, or if he wanted to change the world. The rest is history.

When I first met the members of the Immigrant Youth Justice League (IYJL), they were just a rag-tag band of students meeting in a back conference room in the run down offices of a public radio station – Radio Arte – in the mostly Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen, down on Chicago’s West Side. The group, which had nine regular members at this point and no clear strategy or direction, had pulled together to fight what they felt was the unjust deportation of one of their friends, the 21 year old Rigo Padilla. Rigo was a straight A student at the University of Illinois – Chicago who had been pulled over during a routine traffic stop on campus a block away from his home. When officers asked him for identification, they found out that he was not a legal resident.

The week before, Rigo was researching law schools and studying for the LSAT; now he was looking at the inside of a detention center awaiting the start of his deportation proceedings.

As the newly minted Student Director of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, I was scouring around for causes that students cared about, and while I didn’t quite have a full grasp on it at the time, I could tell that Rigo’s cause was one.

Over the course of the next several months, and then years, I worked to help give IYJL an anchor, a platform and some guidance as they tried to navigate the murky world of politics, personalities and power. What they gave me though was far greater. They gave me hope.

Less than a year after IYJL was formed, we had realized from Rigo’s experience that real stories held power. The fact that he’d now been “dragged out of the closet” gave him a certain freedom to share his story, which moved people and helped produce results. We knew we needed to replicate that, but in order to tell those stories undocumented young people would have to risk everything for their cause. They would have to “come out of the shadows.”

The campaign came to be known by its mantra, “Undocumented, Unafraid.”

It started off slow at first, but within a couple of months undocumented young people were taking to stages and to social media to tell their stories. Almost every day, a different student voluntarily put everything on the line, effectively sacrificing him or herself to the authorities… and to the court of public opinion. Every day, new heroes were being born. Meetings turned into rallies and rallies turned into marches with hundreds, if not thousands of people. A burgeoning political movement built on courage and a shared vision was being created before our eyes, and at this point it was way bigger than any of us.

Sixteen year old high schoolers who were brought to the States at six by no fault of their own now gave a face to the millions of undocumented students just like them who were being persecuted for choices they never made. Their situation could no longer be ignored.

The powerful movement swept like wildfire throughout the country, bringing the immigrants’ rights movement to the fore. When it became clear that there were too many roadblocks at the time to get federal legislation passed, we refused to be deterred and began immediately working on state level legislation which ultimately improved conditions for immigrants in several states – starting with the Illinois DREAM Act – which effectively made Illinois the most progressive state in the Union on immigrants’ rights at the time. All this was possible because a few kids dared to dream. They dared to change the world around them, and they risked everything to make themselves the example in support of the ideals they strove for.

James Hilton said that, “People make mistakes in life by believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.”

Fall where you might on the immigrants’ rights issue, but the fact remains the same: businesses, political movements and organizations of every kind all need the same thing – leaders who are human, but who take passionate stands and who give their people something greater to believe in.

As you continue to shape your own leadership, ask yourself from time to time – does my team believe that they are capable of making a dent in the universe? If not, it’s time to give your people a reason to believe.

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This article was originally posted on my website: https://beingakubuiro.com/