Starting to Chew

Do you ever have an aha! moment where suddenly your eyes are opened to some area of dysfunction in your world and you want to talk about it, but it's complicated and messy and so big that you're not sure where to begin?

And no, I'm not talking about taking a look at your cluttered home and deciding to take a plunge into the KonMari method. That's a big undertaking.

But what I AM talking about...


Is

So

Much

Bigger.

Like becoming woke.

So, yeah.

That's where I'm sitting right now. I wrote that...poem?...essay?...piece?... whatever it was last week instead of the insightful and deeply moving manifesto that inspired people to action that I thought I'd set down to write.

I was kind of bummed that the ideas percolating in my head didn't just come together and make this powerful, one-two punch that would either:

1. Knock some sense into people still ignorant of the happenings in the worlds which they are not a part of yet are all around them; or

2. Bring those of us who are privileged to explore meaningful ways in which we can help our marginalized brothers and sisters and take action towards those findings.

It's tricky, this becoming woke process, being more

...open to hearing new perspectives and valid points, even if the result reveals flaws in their argument.

Being woke is not about being right, saying “down with the man” or winning an argument. It’s about accurately understanding someone's experience and embracing paradigm shifts for the global progression of people. 

I wanted to write about All The Things because I'm finding myself deep in Stage 5 of this process.

Like the realities of racism we still face in our post-civil rights era. But then I remembered our country is still deeply divided about what constitutes equity.

I wanted to talk about privilege and how having it can hinder the accuracy of our assessments of needs facing those who lack it.

Or how coming from privilege with a heart for social justice, even with the best intentions, can have a negative impact by minimizing the efforts of the people who actually belong to a particular group (because the -isms are many more facets than race alone, such as: gender, language, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation,economic class, geography, nation of origin, employment status, physicalabilities, educational status, handedness, and more).

How privileged groups may not actually recognize their privilege[s] and how to explain it in a way that helps them get it. And use that power for good.

Micro-aggressions and how they are perpetuated by both privileged and underprivileged groups alike.
(Amazing comic illustration of what micro-aggressions are is found here.)

And so, so much more.

But, I think for me to make any coherent sense that others might deem worthy of reading, this is going to be like "eating the elephant," in a sense, and be one bite at a time.

And yet, some of those bites come with many layers, too. So maybe each bite will be more than an individual issue.

There may be indigestion ahead.

To me that's ok, because I think there has been not nearly enough indigestion in our country over the years.

Stay tuned.