Graphic. Like the men in China at the turn of the 20th Century who cut their queues as a rejection of an oppressive dynasty, the Movement discarded the outdated idea that people have little power to change things. Significant numbers of activists saw revolution as an answer, and used the slogan, "All Power to the People!" (see text below) to encourage people to take matters into their own hands.
Graphic by Jim Dong.

Serve the People

By Mori Nishida

"All power to the people!" Many of you can relate to this statement. What I’m wondering is, Do you understand what it means? Ultimate power has always been in the hands of the people. What has not been in the hands of the people are the knowledge, the human awareness, and the necessary information and life philosophy to make the statement have any meaning.

Now, what really is meant, and it's not spelled out, is that all power should be given to the knowledgeable, humane, and enlightened people. How do we get these people? We must create an atmosphere that can help develop our people to the point where they can and will control their own destiny.

In the Movement there is another saying ... "Serve the People!" This also has a deeper meaning than its surface value. If we take this phrase at its face value, it generally is taken to mean helping other people. All this creates is another dependency. In order not to fall into this trick bag, we must look at what we are doing. The kind of changes we are talking about when we say, "Serve the People," is institutional change. This means structural development of new community institutions to serve the people.

[01 Transforming Ourselves]     [02 Not Without Struggle]     [03 Serve the People]
[04 Listening to the Small Voice]     [05 The Big Picture]     [06 Revolution]
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