Knowledge is Power

“Knowledge is power”—a famous quote from a theme song to the children’s television show, “Schoolhouse Rock” once told me. Growing up, I was always taught that it is important to know a lot of information; meaning that the more you know, the more success you will attain in life. Now being older, as well as more knowledgeable, I have to admit that there is some success in my life because I was able to know certain things. Yet, on the other hand, much of my success has been inherited through my experiences in life, i.e the power that I use to control what goes on in my life.
What Lappé is expressing is the fact, that we will never know everything! Knowing everything is not even plausible or possible. As Lappé states, “it is not possible to know what’s possible,” (217). She is correct in that, big things come out of small steps. Those small steps brought about huge change, and I am sure those people that brought change, did not have the knowledge beforehand that it would affect so many, and make such a huge contribution. Take for example, our class, and all of the effort we have been doing in teams and/or alone. We were all able to gain knowledge of gleaning, and with that knowledge, we were able to spread our knowledge out to our community, and use it to teach others, assist in feeding, and even do research with a community leader to help others gain more knowledge. With this past semester alone, we have all stepped up, using our knowledge, and created power through experiences, and made a more possible awareness of the School Lunch Program in the Marin community. I, along with many others in the class, am sure that we all did not expect to make such a change in taking a Colloquium class at Dominican. It’s amazing the change we have already made, and we have made it possible for many others to take our knowledge and experience, and use it to create their own.
My main point coorrelates with Lappé’s: “...initiatives you’ve encountered in this book began with one person or a small handful of people. The rapidity of their growth, the parallels in the lessons being learned, suggests that we would be naïve—just plain silly—to underestimate their potential to scale, enabling us to truly live democracy” (217). We need to use our own knowledge and be “willing to say the unpopular and to say what has to be said, even when it upsets another or makes their eyes glaze over!” (218). Using our knowledge, we cannot predict the success in it, but we can use our power and create an experience out of it that can make change.