#20 I Gave Away My Power.

I have been thinking a little about power.  Maybe because my church is doing a preaching series on the book of Amos. That's right, a minor prophet preaching series, that is meant to challenge us and our way of life rather that a series telling us God is good and we can get better.  It's refreshing...in a difficult way.

Anyway, power...I have not done any kind of real study on power.  I've a read "The Powers that Be" by Walter Wink, which I think I mentioned in a previous post.  But I haven't done any real study beyond reading an occasional book.  So this isn't any kind of authoritative survey.  Just my typical meaningless babbling that an average of like 10 people read (I'm sure a book deal is to follow from such an amazing readership).

I have come to think of power as similar to energy.  There is a finite amount of power in the world that can be spread out among many people or can be hoarded by a few.  There is power in each of us sitting latent waiting for the stimulus to push it into action.  There are obviously many kinds of power, economical, personal, political, etc.  Sometimes power is giving to people through votes or mutual understandings of a situation.  Sometimes power is taken by force or manipulated out of someone through systemic injustice (there is Amos!).  I believe the problem comes when the few have too much of the power.  When the few are able to control the many.  Power can shift from latent to kinetic in a short amount of time.  Sometimes getting out of hand as it does.  This happens in revolutions that end up going too far and ending with more of the same oppression that was fought against.  The latent power was converted into kinetic power that was eventual all given to one person or organization.

We can give our power away as I did at the beginning of this little rambling post by giving the little warning that I haven't studied this before writing.  I totally undermined my own power as the author in the process.  I think we do this all the time.  We undermine, manipulate, and steal power without even realizing we are doing it.  I don't think that these evil actions come from evil people, but often start out as a well-meaning actions that end up doing harm.  Sometime self-worth and self-esteem get in the way of our exertion of power and sometimes systems are perpetuated and prosper on keeping certain groups from realizing and living into their power potential.

How can we have a redistribution of power?  Does that have to happen violently? Can we get other people to give up power without having to forcibly take it from them?  It is only natural to want to keep a hold of what you have.  I believe that power structures can be challenged without the use of violence, and I have written about that before, think MLK and Gandhi (see #17). But it is probably the harder road to travel.  If there is a finite amount of power in the world, how are we going to distribute or re-distribute it?