What can I do to right the world’s wrongs?

“WHAT can I do?”

This is how the estranged wife of Ewan McGregor broke her silence in response to her husband allegedly leaving her for another woman. “What can I do?”

It’s not an unusual question; I hear it often and I often ask it myself. I hear of a suicide and I ask - what can I do? I hear of a child dying and I ask – what can I do? I hear of starvation, genocide, atrocities and I ask – what can I do? In the current climate of disclosures about the behaviour of the powerful, I imagine the victims at the core of those allegations long since asking the same question.

“What can I do?”

It’s a simple question that belies its complexity. Are we to deduce from the stories we hear that an individual is powerless? When you think about the science of the domino effect – for that first piece to fall, an external momentum is needed. But how does an individual become that first piece? Where does that external energy come from? Or are such properties exclusive to the realm of superheroes and superpowers; power – that word again.

I am not a hero, I’m not super-human, I am not even exceptional. I am ordinary. This is not an analytical piece on self-esteem – my self-esteem is just dandy – but all told, like most people living out their lives, I’m grand. Yet I can’t help but wonder if being ordinary and being grand is equivalent to being powerless?

Whilst the repulsive stories of influential people behaving badly make me angry, I am inexplicably saddened by the lament of the wife of a movie star in whom she invested 22 years of her life asking the question “what can I do?”

In the book of Proverbs there is a hymn to a good wife detailing what a “good wife” apparently is. In brief, it says she should be trustworthy, frugal, generous, traditional, exotic, servicing, hard-working, skilled and charitable. She should be a seamstress, a home-maker, an entrepreneur, good-humoured and a fearer of God. Charm and beauty are not rated because “charm can mislead and beauty soon fades”. It makes for interesting reading if only to indulge the contradictions therein.

I searched for hymns to a good husband too but I didn’t find any, although what I found in Ephesians should be explored at your own leisure.

Regardless of being a wife, a husband, a powerbroker, a pawn do we really need hymns, books and bibles to tell us how to be a decent human being? People fall out of love but does that mean that we stop treating each other with love? People become powerful but does that mean we stop treating each other with empathy?

So what can I do?

I suppose I can keep my eye on being a decent human being, put a little extra into my ordinary and look on courage as a superpower that might not make me a superhero but might just empower me to become the first piece of the domino effect.