Anyone who knows me knows that I care about a lot of different things and that I follow a lot of different causes and that I work hard to fight oppression in whatever ways I can. In doing so, I am watching some trends and repeated failures that seem so easy to overcome if we just worked a little harder to put aside differences, and to find our common ground. Some of us are never going to be able to do this, I get it and I love you anyway, but from an often outside observer, I do not think that you all see how close you are to working towards the same goal, but forgetting the bigger due to small arguments and perceived transgressions.
It feels to me anymore that if I want to work toward ending any type of oppression, I have to hand in my own list of experiences and ways that I "deserve" to be a part of the process. I am tired of saying to a group or a leader, I am here, I have energy and talents, I have access to power structures that (fair or unfair) you may not have...USE ME, only to be told that I am too straight or too Caucasian, or too financially comfortable to really be helpful. Or maybe I am too radical or not radical enough, or I mess up and use the wrong language, and it goes on and on and on.
My suspicion is that I am probably not the only person out there feeling this way, and it amounts to a ton of lost resources. It is as if we have lost the ability to identify that there is a root cause to the problems that we are all talking about and wanting to change. I taught my little about pulling weeds this summer, he found it easier of course to just break the weed off at ground level and to be done with it. And if you are a gardener, you know that this can be tempting. I mean, at least for a short time we do not see the problem. However, with any experience we also know that although the roots of weeds are stubborn and deep, if we do not get them out of there, the weed will come back in less than a week. Sometimes those weeds are prickly and painful to deal with, but if I want to harvest healthy vegetables in a few months, I have to make sure that obstacles to their growth are out of the way.
As I was putting together all of my swirling thoughts about this issue, I was reminded of my scientifically groundbreaking fifth grade science fair project. I built a maze box, and at the end I put a reward and then plopped a mouse in the other end and watched what happened. I timed them, and changed the game now and again to see how they would react, and it sort of seems like that is what is going on with all of the groups that are fighting against powerful ingrained systems that make us feel weak and oppressed. There are people in power in this world, and if we are honest with ourselves there are not a whole lot of them. They have the wealth and the privilege and the authority and the weapons and the cruelty that keep all of these other groups of people down. And I think that they learned long ago to put us in the maze individually, and if we ever get close to the goal, they change the game. The unfortunate thing is that we keep behaving in ways that probably amuse them and empower them even more.
Maybe what we need to do is agree to enter the maze together. Some of us might have a good sense of smell so we know where the cheese is, but our sense of direction sucks so we do not know how to get there. Maybe some of us have great leaping abilities and can not be stopped by walls, while others keep bumping into the same obstacle over and over again. I think that what we really need to remember is that none of us wins entirely if we do not all eventually get to the goal. It does not feel good to me at least to enjoy a reward or privilege if I know that there are still folks in the maze that cannot find their way. I want them to succeed too.
Dichotomies seem to be the biggest problem that I am seeing us face. It is all male vs. female, people of color vs. white, gay vs. straight, left vs. right, rich vs. poor, able vs. disabled, old vs. young and so on. And the really painful thing to see is that within each of those dichotomies we further break down the positions of privilege and power. Most of the active movements that I see are so narrowly focused on one little branch of the problem that they refuse to dig out the root. I am not going to even try to list these types of issues, because they are strong in their multitudes. We just need to wake up to the strings on our backs, and realize that none of the rest of us are pulling them. It is really at its root in my opinion power and authority vs. absolute powerlessness. We can fool ourselves into the seductive temptation of grabbing for little bits of power and privilege because at least it's something, right? But until we are willing to accept that having little nibbles of the cheese is not acceptable when what we really need for the whole community is ALL of the cheese.
Sometimes this all happens for obviously selfish reasons like monetary gain, or notoriety, or even that pervasive need to just be right. But it also happens for lots of smaller unnamed reasons. It is easy as activists to think in lofty platitudes of selflessly working for the greater good. None of us is ever being selfless in what we are doing. Each and every one of us is gaining in some way through what we are doing or we just would not do it. It's okay to own selfishness and is delusional not to. For myself, it just makes me feel good on the most basic level, and on a deeper level, I do recognize that I have privileges that I did nothing to deserve and it serves my needs to pay something back to people who do not have those same privileges. In real reflection though, the most selfish thing about my actions is this overwhelming feeling I have that I need to pave the way to make things better for the little. He is white, but he may grow to love a person of color and perhaps my actions today will benefit my future grandchildren. He has not indicated to me one way or another at this point to what his sexual or gender orientation might be, but when he does, I want to make sure that his rights will be protected. He may grow up to make choices that are destructive or dangerous and I want to make sure that by the time that would happen, there is not such corruption in law enforcement that his white skin no longer protects him. It also serves me to serve others because it is the best way I know to show him what our family's values are, and to develop those values in him. Mostly, I just want to be the kind of person that he already thinks I am.
A little more self-reflection of that nature would go a long way. But no self-reflection is any damn good if we do not do something with it. A little less talking and a little more listening would be a good place to start. I was so overwhelmed with emotions watching things unfold in Ferguson that I did not know what to do with those feelings, and I ran into dealing with white people who either had no clue or actively wanted to avoid the topic to dealing with a host of other folks telling me that I did not have the proper credentials to care. And that spiraled me into even more anger and frustration and I am human, and I lashed out in a lot of ways. But I really have been trying to put that in check. I took a step back, and tried to listen to the pain and lived experience of the all to often "frightening other". This did not diminish my own pain, and rage, and confusion, it actually clarified a lot of things for me. I learned so much that I did not know before. And it was all because I listened, was brave enough to ask questions, and shared my own frustrations with people who look and speak and act differently than I do. It has tempered some of my anger, and increased some of my anger. But it has offered a bit of clarity about what is really going on.
My final analogy has to do with the last time that I worked at the local soup kitchen. While the group of folks I was working with could have debated about the nutrition content, or the organic nature of, or the sourcing of the food we were serving or how it should be cooked and who should do it, in that moment of urgency of needing to produce for lines of people who just really needed to not be hungry, we worked together and fed all of them. All of those other arguments became so trivial, because a mama with a baby crying from the pain of an empty belly does not care where the tomato came from or how it was raised. Her need to resolve a crisis overcame our need to always intellectualize and tear everything down to its least common denominator. It is a well worn bit of philosophy, but one that bears repeating, the whole is in fact greater than the sum of its parts.
So please fellow activists and people who give a damn, can we please gaze together at the bigger picture and see it for the mosaic that it is. We can all fight for our favorite issue in concert with others fighting for theirs and if we combine resources and stop replicating and re-creating a wheel that has already been working, we really can accomplish phenomenal things. And we need to bring the people living the pain into the conversation. We are often complicit in making things so much worse for them. Because we make promises and show them that they deserve more and that we are going to help them get there. But when energy flags, and things get complicated or ugly, or we do not think that they are accepting our help in the right way, we throw up our hands and move on to the next more attractive project, and that is a tragedy.
If you have managed to read this far, and I appreciate it if you did, please dialogue with me about your thoughts, your fears, your needs, your experiences. Access each other and lift each other up. I would like to humbly repeat to you what I said before, and realize that I mean it with sincerity that you cannot begin to imagine... I am here, I have energy and talents, I have access to power structures that (fair or unfair) you may not have...USE ME.
Love and light my friends.
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