Facing the early afternoon glare, our eyes are partly closed while my son, my wife and I are at a Metropolitan Transit Authority (METRO) rail station. It is the scene depicted in a photograph I found from 2004. A closer look shows that the squint and the prescription lenses obscure the melancholy and uncertainty in my eyes as I internally processed imminent change in my calling.

That Spring was my last with the nation’s leading nonprofit civic engagement organization. The journey, as a community organizer, devoted to increasing Latino voter participation came to an end. No more registering voters at naturalization ceremonies. No more teaching citizenship classes or organizing US Citizenship workshops in schools, churches and community centers throughout Southeast Texas. I had accepted a job in County government. Professionally, it was a lateral move and less prominent public position. At the time of the snapshot, feeling like I was absconding the responsibility to lead, I was struggling to come to terms with the decision.

After 15 years of organizing literally hundreds of voter registration and citizenship activities, I was tired and ready for a sabbatical from nonprofit work. One indelible incident the previous fall expedited my exit. In the process of conducting annual Get-Out-the-Vote programmatic activities for the November Elections, I was invited to speak to an on-campus Latino student group at a local university. Seeing it as an opportunity to engage young Latinos and speak about how they can help increase Latino voter participation by visiting and calling Latino registered voters, I accepted.

Somewhere between being placed on the meeting agenda and addressing the student group, the leader decided that the group’s civic engagement activity for the semester was going to be to do face painting at the Arts Festival. From the dais, the Chair of the meeting made a declaration directed at me. He disdainfully asserted that it was not necessary for me to address the group, because they were not going to get involved in any political voter mobilization effort. Reasoning that each member should hear what I had to say and individually determine whether it was an activity in which they wanted to participate, the person that invited me to the meeting made a successful motion to let me speak.

Watching the events unfold, I experienced a huge adrenaline rush. I could feel my blood raging through my body as I began to express my disappointment in a forceful manner.  I thanked the membership for the opportunity to speak. Then, I announced that what had transpired at this meeting had finally convinced me to quit community organizing.

As someone who had spent years physically, emotionally and spiritually invested in the idea of empowering the Latino community, I persisted, I could no longer tolerate individuals whose idea of changing society begins and ends with wearing a t-shirt with Che Guevara’s iconic image on it. Having been a student who associated with members of the most radical Latino organization on campus, I had come to understand how the on-campus faux Guerrillero Heroico—“Heroic Guerrilla Warrior”— mindset had no direct impact on the off-campus struggle for equity for Latinos.

Referencing Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Friedrich Nietzsche and Socrates, I posited that students’ electoral inaction is inconsistent with the idea that the greatest thing we could do in our life is contribute to the building of a good and just society. At some point, I exhorted, we had to grow-up. I closed the impassioned soliloquy with a rhetorical question, metaphorically dropping the mic, “If YOU don’t give a crap about the state of our community, why should I?”

At the start of 2004, METRO launched its rail service in time to transport thousands of persons to the new Harris County Sports facility to experience the Super Bowl. Three days after the game, the initial version of Facebook was launched. A week later, San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. About a month later, Ireland became the first country to ban smoking in enclosed workspaces.

Sometime after the big game, as part of my son’s birthday celebration, we took him on a ride on METRORail. We were waiting for the train in Houston’s Midtown, an area once known as the Fourth Ward, when the photo that triggered this memory was taken.

Four years into the new millennium, transformational events in Houston and the world reminded me that change is an inevitable part of life; and, our capacity to adapt to it is integral to our well-being and continued existence.