11/1/2020 The victory we seek
I hope this first day of November finds you safe and well.
The week ahead promises its share of tension. Voting in the 2020 election wraps up on Tuesday; counting will just begin that day. We are reminded that no counts are final until states certify them, typically up to two weeks after election "day." Ensuring time to count every vote is a sign of the strength of the system we have in place.
The first day that the news won't be filled with election stories is still far in our future. The extent to which we long for that day is one of the many things we have in common.
I know we also long for a return to pre-pandemic 'normalcy.' No matter who is declared the winner of the presidency, change will not occur like the flip of a switch. We can't let ourselves unsee the deep inequities the pandemic has revealed to those of us whose relative privilege allowed us, previously, to look away. The work will continue.
For today, this day that many cultures designate to honor ancestors, it seems fitting to take a deep breath and remember our place in the human story: a story that is far longer than one election cycle, one administration, one lifetime, one generation. We inherit much from those who have come before us, we stand on the foundation they built. We commit ourselves to making the foundation stronger for the generations to come after us.
And, my dear ones, that is the exciting part: the realization that our ability to work for justice, inclusion, equality, and the health of all life, is not bound to any external events. It is available to us all the time. We cherish the sensation of being awake to our potential to grow, the potential of our communities to heal, and of our systems to transform.
We certainly need cycles of work and rest, effort and recuperation. We need time to pause and grieve, time to pause and celebrate. We need times to sacrifice, and times to replenish. We can help one another through those cycles.
Whether we celebrate or grieve this coming week - or both - we won't stop. As John Biewen, audio program director at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and host of "Seeing White" reminds us:
"All that our systems of hierarchy and injustice — racism, classism, etc., etc. — all that they need to just keep rolling along is for all of the 'good white people' to just go about our lives, being good, nonracist white people, because the systems are embedded deeply enough in our society, in our culture, that they function pretty much on their own, and so that we need to be about disrupting them. And that takes a certain kind of openness in the way that we scrutinize things, the way we look at ourselves, the way we look at our relationship to the world as it is, the way we look at how we all got to this moment. And we need to be willing to rethink things, and do things differently, more to the point."
I'll leave you with a quote from Nicholas Christakis, a medical doctor and sociologist who directs Yale's Human Nature Lab. Dr. Christakis has written a book on the impact of this pandemic: "Apollo's Arrow: The Profound And Enduring Impact Of Coronavirus On The Way We Live."
"We have so many wonderful qualities, we humans do... These include the capacity for love, the capacity for friendship, the fact that we cooperate with each other, that we make sacrifices to even benefit strangers, that we teach and learn from each other.... we do them naturally. We evolved to do them. And I think this is miraculous...
"The fact that we live socially, the fact that we make social networks - these are the highways across which the germs travel. That's why I said the spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas. But the irony is that the opposite is also true - that it's through the spread of ideas that we're going to beat back the germ. It's precisely because we can work together. We can cooperate. We can exchange information. These are the tools we're going to use, ultimately, in my view, to have victory over this virus."
I love the idea that the tools of sharing and cooperating are what we need to bring the victory we seek, over sickness and injustice. And I love you all - I'm so grateful for all you bring to this shared journey.
With gratitude,
Liz
Read the transcript of the full interview with John Biewen here: https://onbeing.org/programs/john-biewen-the-long-view-i-on-being-white/
Read the transcript of the full interview with Dr. Christakis here: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/29/929073472/denial-and-lies-are-almost-an-intrinsic-part-of-an-epidemic-doctor-says