Day after day we see hatred rise up in the world and our anxious flailing towards ‘what to do’ increases. We become debilitated by both the anger/fear and the possibilities before us. We become blinded to the good we can jump in on. We fail to see the love we can be a part of.
Yes, we must remember to breathe. We must remember to go into ourselves and see what we are to speak love and truth into. We must remember that often where we are to give action is usually a place of palpable discomfort.
And, more than anything, more than ever, we must recall that these are the moments that not only define who we are and what we stand for but are also the moments that reveal that precise truth and love to our children, our friends, our lovers, our families, and even those we disagree with. The children in our lives are watching us and taking cues… are we showing them something worth following? Are we breathing love into their lives? Are we demonstrating the truth of equality for their hearts? Are we standing up for our friends and pointing to love and truth in moments where hatred is so loud? Day after day after day?
Our routes forward are different means of expressing this love and truth, mine is no less or more important than yours. But a common thread is hosted in all those ways; a common thread that is woven into all of our hearts to want what is right, what is equal, what is good, what is loving, what is kind, what is truth, what is just.
I am entirely against white supremacy and the hatred it stands for.
Can we really, for a moment, imagine what it is like to be one our black friends today? Can we really, for a heartbeat, imagine what it is like to be one of our Muslim coworkers today? Can we really, for a breath, consider what it is like to be one of our immigrant neighbors today? We must walk with one another, feel one another’s pain (as best we can) and carry each other’s hearts with tenderness.
Which way is truly forward if we do not first examine the things within ourselves that even subconsciously permit a perpetuation of hatred? How can we really begin if we are not tending also to our own wars within? Whether these are acts of violence against our environment, hatred towards ourselves, or even our fears towards the government or systems of injustice… do they not also point to a tolerance of violence and hatred in some capacity? We must shed ourselves of these things. We must step out of comfort for the sake of all of our lives.
To imply your voice does not matter or makes no difference, is to suggest that there is not a way forward. People hear you: at your job, in your home, with your friends, with your children, your nephews and nieces, amongst your family. People read your words. Your voice and your words MATTER. Your action and presence MATTER. Because it is by unification of bodies and voices of love that we can begin to step forward. And it is in this unification that we hold one another’s trembling hands to do better, to do right, to give ourselves to love and truth. To show real love, we must first be love. To offer hope, we must first risk frustration and fear.
So, what will be our stance in these days? What will be our way forward in love and truth? How will we show the children in our lives what is right?
We say and we’re told that love wins, but we must remember that love winning requires our voices, our actions, our lives…
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An excerpt from Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
“I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you… What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am black, because I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?…And, of course, I am afraid– you can hear it in my voice– because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside of you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth.”…On the cause of silence, each one of us draws her own fear– fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we also cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson– that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, black or not. And that visibility which makes you most vulnerable is also our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind us into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in out corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our safe corners as mute as bottles, and still we will be no less afraid.”
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“I am therefore not completely human until I have found myself in my African and Asian and Indonesian brother because he has the part of humanity which I lack.” Thomas Merton
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