Tag: justice

activism, Take Action

Act Now

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Here is a small selection of things that don’t work:

  • Wearing black
  • Fretting
  • Posting “Joe Biden: White House Troublemaker” memes (although a giggle is good medicine)
  • Wearing a safety pin
  • Returning to safe, familiar, more-or-less neutral patterns of work and social life
  • Conflating the expression of feelings with action
  • Rehashing outrage and fear in casual conversations with friends and family who agree with us
  • Repeatedly checking social media to watch horrors as they unfold
  • Waiting to see what else he does before doing anything ourselves

Here is what does work:

  • Asking the next question: What action will we take today — this very day — in the service of justice and our common future on this planet?

Continue reading “Act Now” →

activism, Determination

The Power you Have

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procession

Are you willing to use the power you have in the service of what you say you believe?

-Audre Lorde

We’d scheduled a White House tour for the morning after the election.  My 10-year-old son was already excused from school for the day. Through the night, the red stain bleeding across the map tangled me into a knot of sleepless apprehension.  It drew tighter every time I reached for the phone to pull up CNN.  As the unreality of our new president crystallized into fact, fear of what will happen to our nation, to my neighbors and our shared home — and the uncertainty about how to be a mother through it all — metastasized from compulsion to obsession.

Continue reading “The Power you Have” →

activism, community

Dear School Board: You’re Getting The Transgender Thing Right

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Dear Fairfax County School Board,

Please don’t stop.  You’re getting this one right.  When you decided in May 2015 to add “gender identity” to the non-discrimination policy, you took a step that will put our schools on the right side of history.  You’ve been facing some pretty loud resistance to the decision, and I want to tell you that those voices are not the only ones out here.  Also here are parents who are thankful that our kids go to schools that recognize the dignity and worth of all people. Continue reading “Dear School Board: You’re Getting The Transgender Thing Right” →

Determination, Purpose

Bleached Bones and Jumbled Residues

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We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”

– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam, A Time to Break Silence,” delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

Change, Purpose

The Myth of Colorblindness

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We tell ourselves the story that we have triumphed over the (official) racism of the land. We say, “It was awful then.” Then we twist ourselves into logical contortions to explain or ignore mass incarceration of Black men, the economic marginalization of communities of color, and a whole continuum of institutional racism.

In the post-civil rights era, newer forms of racism present formidable obstacles because they recruit and rely on our belief system about racial equality and egalitarianism. They hold that we exist in a meritocracy, and any consideration of race in policy or access is itself indicted as racism.  The new forms are more insidious than the public expressions of white supremacy so easily identified and vilified as racist.  Our shared narrative is a public expression of racial equality.  Continue reading “The Myth of Colorblindness” →

community, Growing Up, Purpose

Resonate

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umbrella house

It was easier when the heroes were prophets. They stood just far enough forward that we had to keep moving to keep up. We had to lean in to hear. That was when tyrants wore names like uniforms. Good and evil faced off across chasms and we knew better than to tumble between. We stood firm on our side. Myth grew us a chorus of muses. They sang in every shade of green.

Over across the way, it was hard to make out anything but ruin. Rumor had it someone had salted the earth. The restoration was a long way off. We knew we could only build a bridge after the villains had been vanquished. Even if we could arrive sooner to begin the purge and planting, would our comrades welcome us? Would they even recognize us? Continue reading “Resonate” →

community, Things I Can

79. Things I Can Rescue: Our Republic

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Lawrence Lessig asks, “Do you have that love?”

Do you claim your urgent and aching love for this great democratic project? Do you turn towards what it can still be instead of what we’ve already lost?

Do you fight with everything you’ve got?

For their 2014-18 Congregational Study/Action Issue, the Unitarian Universalists have chosen Escalating Inequality:

Challenging extreme inequality is a moral imperative. The escalation of inequality undergirds so many injustices which our faith movement is committed to addressing: from economic injustice to mass incarceration; from migrant injustice to climate change; from sexual and gender injustice to attacks on voting rights.

In study groups and conversations, we learn root causes and undo myths, all with the aim of taking effective action.

Up the street from here is a UU church. Members of an Escalating Inequality group meet monthly to engage these hard questions and think together about how to reclaim what is precious to us, and what may ultimately be all that saves us: our voices, our power, our hope.

Our love.

 

Choices, community, Things I Can

78. Things I Can Wear: This Garment of Ours

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While work hours declined dramatically during the first half of the twentieth century, thanks to higher wages, economic growth, trade unions, and progressive legislation, they have increased during the last three decades. Americans now work an average of one extra month per year than they did in 1980, and single mothers work an extra six weeks. Employees often work overtime and outside their job descriptions for fear of losing their jobs if they refuse. Cutbacks and downsizing have further increased workloads, making it all the more necessary to operate at the top of one’s game all day long, without any lapses. Fear of what one night of lost sleep could do to one’s appearance and performance the next day has become a common concern.

– Kat Duff in The Secret Life of Sleep

We know it is zip code and native tongue, it is the body that houses the name. It is a solid school building and a safe walk there. It is scouts and sports and skate parks and dance troupes with coaches as supplemental mentors. It is a small stack of cards: library and HMO, towing and voting, ID and credit. It is the transcript and the stamp of the alma mater, and the names of the friends collected in those four years. It is the legs and the shoes at the bottom of them, it is a specialist with attention enough to notice the gap and intervene early, it is refrigeration, it is screened windows, it is the magnetic attraction of luck to fortune already acquired. It is all of this as water to a clownfish.  Continue reading “78. Things I Can Wear: This Garment of Ours” →