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| ISSUE NO. 602 |
| IN OVERWHELMING TIMES . . . keep it simple. Simplicity can take a surprising amount of effort...but if you manage it, yields an instant sense of relief. We are a woman-owned business, overwhelmed with grief and rage by the continued need to fight against the most powerful systems in our country for the rights to our own bodies. We've been here before. And the familiarity of this overwhelm means that we can learn from the past. The wisdom for today is: keep it simple. There is no way to sustain the work of social justice without simple, one-day-at-a-time tools. There is too much apathy, dissonance, pain, complicity, comfort, and numbing to overcome if we treat every piece of news as a call to race into battle. This week, I'm finding that it helps me to consider the impact of individualism in my reaction to personal, professional, and world news cycles. From a social justice or anti-racist perspective, you may be familiar with individualism as a way of seeing people as separate and independent from one another, judging people for their personal traits rather than the many systemic factors that influence who they are and how they show up in the world. It's a tricky characteristic of the White supremacy delusion, as Dr. Tiffany Jana is careful to refer to it, because it can be used to support a colorblind approach to race, the idea that we should all be judged as individuals. And while that is what social justice is working toward, we are not there yet, and we won't get there by ignoring the very real impacts of racism and colorism. So how does awareness of individualism help me to keep it simple? Because I realized that my sense of responsibility is impacted by a belief I am harboring...that somehow I am supposed to do it all myself. It goes hand in hand with a sense of urgency, and tends to attract guilt, shame, despair, and/or helplessness. We risk exhausting ourselves, and harming others, by rushing toward the fire. Maybe my work is not always - or ever - meant to be in the fire itself, but somewhere on the periphery, filling jugs of water, digging a trench, warning others, or caring for the earth in a way that reduces future risk. To keep it simple is to remember that we are in community with one another. Today, the best you may be able to do is smile, or feed yourself or someone else, or weep over a book of poetry. That's okay. If the choice is between giving up or keeping it simple, we choose the latter. Onward, |
tidbits...resources on anti-racism, environmentalism and food culture AKA stuff we're reading / listening to / watching / noticing / thinking about / captivated by this Tuesday . . . |
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