Why Try To Change Policies?

As we've discussed, policies usually grow out of people's basic assumptions about the world.......
As a result, they're often difficult to change, and efforts to do so require patience, sensitivity, and hard work if they're to be successful. Why go to all that trouble? Why not just try to get around or ignore policy in the particular instance you're concerned with, and leave it at that?

There are a number of excellent reasons why changing policies is worth the trouble. In general, it's the difference between sweeping problems under the rug, and actually cleaning them up so they don't appear again.

    

Policies are the basis for community decisions. If you can change the policy, you may be able to affect - for the better, we assume - community decisions about an issue well into the future.
    

Attempting to change policies can start a community conversation about the issues in question. Attempts at policy change make clear that current policies are inadequate to deal with the issues, and start people thinking about why. The resulting discussions can change people's thinking about other issues as well, and about the direction of the community as a whole.
 

 Changing policy is easier in the long run than fighting the same battles over and over again. Even if you're successful in gaining concessions on a particular issue, if you haven't changed the policy toward that issue, you may have to work to gain those concessions again each time the issue arises. Addressing policy versus addressing the issue in a vacuum can be compared to addressing the root causes of a disease versus treating its symptoms. If you eliminate the causes, the patient can be cured; if you only treat the symptoms, he'll feel better for a while, but the disease will flare up again.
    

Changed policies can change people's minds and attitudes. One theory of child-rearing that seems to work reasonably well in practice is that if the child behaves in an acceptable way for long enough, that behavior becomes internalized as part of the child's self-image. It is, in other words, no longer merely behavior, but part of what the child conceives as herself and the way she is. The same can be true of a community: once an issue is addressed in particular ways, the new policies themselves become part of the community's self-image, and lead to long-term change.
    

Changed policies have effects on the next generation. As proponents of civil rights hoped, and racists feared, integration had its greatest effects on schoolchildren. A whole generation grew up feeling that having friends of different races was normal. It would be foolish to pretend that racial prejudice no longer exists in the US. It's still a serious problem, but nowhere near the problem it was for the first hundred years after the Civil War, largely because of the generational effects of the enforcement of anti-segregation laws.
    

Policy change is one path to permanent social change. For all of the reasons above, changing policies is really a way to change society. The policies in question may come from above, in the form of official government policies translated into laws or regulations. Or they may come from the grass roots, from unions and workplaces and social groups. Regardless of where they originate, changes in policy that speak to the real causes of social issues and to the real needs of the people involved lead to real and permanent social change.