Right off the heels of a humongous NYC Peoples Climate March that numbered in the hundreds of thousands (over a quarter million – possibly half a million folks), newspaper headlines have been replaced with the U.S. attack on Syria.
My personal response has been to become tearful, depressed and spend the past day or so with a debilitating migraine. It seems indulgent to talk about my emotions, rather than to focus on the actual issue at hand. The people who are being killed and maimed. Yet, I also think it is necessary to discuss those feelings, because it is necessary to be able to push through them in order to be able to do something. Ferguson. NFL rape culture. Children killed, abused and neglected by U.S. border patrol. Israel attacking Gaza. U.S. attacking Syria.
I posted a status on FB that I feared to lose my humanity. I used to feel anger and hope and the motivation to speak out, to protest, to try to change the world’s wrongs I now feel depression and exhaustion and hopelessness. I remind myself that anger turned inwards is depression and therefore it must be expressed outwards to not cause one ownself harm. But I suppose it is not my humanity that I fear losing; it is rather a fear that I’ll lose out my belief in that our efforts to right wrongs matter. That they’ll make a difference. That we’ll change the world.
25ish years ago I remember taking all sorts of actions against the wars abroad and at home. Orchestrating school walkouts, attending protests, writing resistance poetry, speaking with the media, attending (protesting really) city government meetings, creating educational sit-ins with amazing radical speakers, selling books dissecting our society on street corners at discounted prices. I did all this because I thought the world could and would change in vital ways. It was worth risking jail and cops battering protesters, because it would result in a more just world. And really, it felt like I was risking way less to life and limb than folks who were around protesting in past movements or in other countries.
I had an amazing teacher in community college who mentioned “The day before the Berlin Wall went down, if you had asked people if the wall would be there the next day they would have said yes. Change happens and when it does it can seem very sudden, but the buildup is there all along.” At the time, I was also part of a roots movement organization that helped organize the educational events and protests I was a participated in. So I was sustained by others who felt equally passionate and committed to manifesting the world we wanted to live in.
During that time (2 plus decades ago) the Persian Gulf War happened. So did the acquittal of the police officers who beat up Rodney King despite that there was video documenting their actions. And when they were acquitted my faith in the world tumbled. You see, it’s not so much my humanity I fear losing – it’s that I fear that those who are in power have lost theirs and will not recoup it. When those cops were acquitted I was livid. I was livid because I had expected that with a video they wouldn’t be able to escape their crimes. What my emotions showed back then is that I had faith that with proof there would come justice. That middle and upper class folks and white folks in general would no longer continue to deny the lived realities of folks intentionally othered by the institutions in this U.S. capitalist system.
So when folks raise half a million for the racist officer who murdered a teenager in Ferguson I was disgusted, but not shocked. I felt deflated, and while I felt I should do something (such as work on getting my own city to require police officers to wear video cameras at all times) – I didn’t do anything other than talk about it in social media. I keep thinking – but what if they turn off the videos when they abuse someone, will those videos really protect people, if cops were forced to wear them (like the Rialto Police where abuses statistically went down). And as for Syria – Iraq can be blamed on Republican Presidents, but Syria cannot be – our current U.S. President is a central Democrat. So voting Democrat doesn’t solve the issue, and voting a third alternative doesn’t seem to have the momentum to succeed (and if it did would the U.S. not simply engage in voting fraud as it did for the Bush Jr. elections)?
So what does all this mean to my own activism? The personal is political, the political personal. The tagline on The People’s Climate March website is To Change Everything, We Need Everyone. Folks may wonder what The Occupy Movement accomplished; perhaps “We are the 99%” – creating such a succinct awareness is one of the most vital things that resulted. So I take that and I work on breaking down the barriers that keep me from connecting to other folks – pushing back against my own privileges and owning them and speaking out about the ways I may experience marginalizations (in other words oppression, owning the way instititutional “isms” may benefit or harm me and others). Dismantling those obstacles amongst each other, so that we truly become the Everyone. So we realize the humanity of others and by doing so manifest the humanity within ourselves.
Picture this for a moment. Picture an average U.S. citizen. Whom pops into your mind? Whom are you picturing?
Whom did you center as representative of the U.S.? Do they look like you? What is their gender identity? What about their ethnicity? Their physical abilities? Their class status? Now think about the ways the initial person you pictured doesn’t hold equal space for the person you may not have pictured. Did you erase the humanity of the homeless veteran or single mom or heck just the down on his luck unemployed young able bodied homeless white male? If you pictured someone white – do you other folks who have ethnic features such as a different skin color or eye shape or do you make assumptions of someone’s birth place because they share the same features as you do? If you pictured someone able bodied – have you thought about if the bank or restaurant or park you walk in is accessible to them too and if not what are you doing to speak up about that and change it? The person you pictured can they easily find a public bathroom? Or are they transgendered and have to hope that their need to pee doesn’t result in harassment, or being beaten up? Did you actually picture the average U.S. citizen or did you picture the person you are most personally comfortable being around?
Part 2 under Wonderful Wednesdays – Images that Manifest Activism’s Humanity
The Sesspool - Dive on In 