A contestant on America’s Got Talent sang a silly song about wanting more Parmesan cheese. Simon Cowell, one of the judges, hit the X button quickly, and then the other judges followed, giving him four Xs, which meant he was done.

Still, the guy kept singing to the audience and didn’t let the judges’ Xs affect him. He sang confidently, directing the audience to sing along with him, and they loved him. When he finished, the audience booed the judge’s decisions and then chanted the judges’ names to get them to change their minds and let the guy through. Heidi Klum said, “It’s the power of the people.” Simon Cowell said, “Sometimes you got to listen to the public.”  They wound up removing their Xs and letting him through. Someone said, “We have to listen to the fifth judge.”

The fifth judge is us, the people.

The judges overturned their decision because the audience persuaded them to do so. The power of the people won over the judges.

It got me thinking about how this applies to real life. We don’t realize the power we have to make changes, and we let it slip by like a leaf blowing in the wind during a rainstorm. We complain about rising prices, insufficient doctors, incompetent staff, long waits at the emergency room, low salaries, unfair work practices, and so on. Our words fly off like leaves, and nothing gets changed.

We are the fifth judge – the ones who ultimately get to decide, yet we don’t use our power to do that. We let it slip away into the wind.

 

Think about a movie. Its ultimate success is based on the number of people who see it. The more people who see it, the more money it makes. It doesn’t have to be a great, Oscar-worthy film that the critics love, giving tremendous value to the movie industry. No, the people, the fifth judge, paid their money to see the movie, and the numbers created its success, not the script or actors in it.

Could you imagine if we followed those emails years ago that told us not to buy gas on a specific day? If everyone did not buy gas for one day, it would have shown Big Oil companies that they can’t push the American people around, and they would have to adjust the price to what we want because we’re filling their pockets with money.

Yet not many people believe that. Instead, people would rather complain about the rising gas prices than do something about it.  I mean, look at how gas prices mysteriously increase around major holidays or in summer when Big Oil knows people travel and need gas in their vehicles. Yet, we saw a decrease in gas prices during the Pandemic when people weren’t driving around. People driving controls the price of gas.

Using our power doesn’t have to look like this:

It can look like this:

We have social media at our fingertips to help make changes. This article, How to Complain About a Company and Get Results gives tips on how to get a company’s attention politely using social media.

Or this:

In this article from Entrepreneur magazine, Jaqueline Whitmore describes the Business Benefits of the Handwritten Letter. 

I have been writing letters to businesses for years. And I don’t believe it’s a waste of time. I once wrote a letter to Geisinger about an awful experience I had. One part of the complaint was that nurses called me by my middle name, even after I corrected them. And I received a thank you card, signed by nurses and staff after my hospital stay, addressed to my middle name! Sometime later, my daughter was in the hospital, and I heard a nurse say (never heard it before), “What do you like to be called?” Then the nurse wrote the name on a dry-erase board in the room. It might be a coincidence or not. I like to believe I used my time wisely to help make a change so that others did not have to go through what I did.

The point of this post is to show we have power, but we have to use it to see any change. The more people use their power, the more change will occur. Children used to work in horrific conditions before enough people made the powers in control know it was not acceptable, and child labor laws were created. If no one spoke up, would children still work in those conditions?

Let’s start believing we can cause change with our actions; and the more, the merrier! If we take small actions collectively, we can make significant changes that will help all of us.

Thank you for reading this. I hope I’ve inspired you to realize the power we all have to make changes to better our lives. Please comment with your thoughts about this.

To Being the Fifth Judge,

Francesca