Responsibility

I can say that after 10 years of pussy footing around, which wasn't working, it's time to talk plain. And my experience is, when white people start introspecting on these issues the hate and the mean come out in defense of the shame and the fear.

I have previously done this work in a Christian context, and I am a Christian, but if all you know is from TV, well, that is TV not Christian, and honesty compels me to say most Christians going to church are pretending they are on TV, too.

But here is the thing. This is moral work. This is about human centric living, not dollar centric or crap centric living (do not hear the whole the earth is for us to destroy, I don't go there), and it is so much easier to buy into the American and infecting idea that we take care of our own as me, me, me and maybe my kids or friends, and apply live and let live to everyone else because that allows us to abdicate our responsibility to humans and for systems we live in.

If you aren't engaged in politics - how do we live together in communities and nations and planetarians - you can't do this work. Because you can't see why it is necessary. And you have to have found your reasons why people are deserving of our responsible actions. At least religious people are trying, if poorly, to think about this. I so rarely find it in TV programming. Now, we are definitely making morality in this culture - but it, in dominant culture, so often perpetuates of the unspoken assumption of the live and let live and not my problem morality, and never exploring the consequences of that morality.

There is a difference between imposing my unspoken assumptions of "right" living on another and my knowing how I am living and how it is breaking over the heads of others. I have a responsibility to know that there are consequences to my choices and how they are affecting other and being able to hear and respond with as much grace and compassion as I can when I fuck it up. Because we all fuck it up - we aren't in a vacuum so that is always going to happen, but how we respond to that, how we try to mitigate it, that comes from actually hearing what those consequence are for someone rather than guessing and then fixing things in ways that don't really make me have to change.