My Apologies

I need to offer an apology of sorts. This has been an emotional time for me, and I have reacted before thinking in a lot of instances. In doing so, I have possibly alienated a number of folks without the intention of doing so. Lack of intention does not mean that I am not accountable for that. My anger and frustration have overshadowed my ability to think rationally. Sometimes this is a good tool and sometimes it is not.

So I am sorry to all of you who I have been short with, or frustrated with. I am sorry for not understanding that we all come to realizations in our own time. My timeline is not your timeline. In the past couple of days I have tried to take a step back and find center again. I am not totally there. I am still super pissed, but much of my anger stems from the powerlessness I feel in changing ingrained ideas in myself and in most of the folks I know.

So I am trying to slow down. I am going to try to be more patient, and to find a voice that is better able to be heard by more folks. I have done a lot of listening of my own during this time, and it has gotten through to me that there is little that I am thinking or saying that has not already been thought or said.  The problem is that these voices I am listening to are not being heard by the people who need to hear them.

There have been discussions among some of my closer friends that sometimes to get your message heard, you have to find five or more ways of saying it. I try to keep that in mind. I have thought that I could impart some sort of divine wisdom on people in just one way, and that they should wake up and say, Yes Cathy I totally see what you are saying.

Systematized oppression has been hundreds of years in the making. It affects people in marginalized groups in a very real way, an excruciatingly painful way, and they are tired of trying to explain to the rest of us what that feels like. They are in many instances preaching to the choir. And the people who need to hear the message are not being exposed to it.

So here is what I have come up with. My voice does not need to be heard. I have had plenty of opportunities to talk, and I cannot tell the story any better than those who are living it. So in the next few days when I am posting about race issues, for the most part I am going to try to let others do the talking, and I may try to present it in a way that my people can understand. Because what I think our biggest problem is is that we just do not know how to listen to each other without feeling the need to be right.

Now, if you accept this apology, I ask you to keep an eye on what you will see here because I have done a lot of work, research and reading to try to get some important voices out there. These are not famous voices in most cases, but their messages are to my mind vitally important and if we ignore them, we are doing ourselves a disservice.