I'm sitting here, having scrolled through Facebook and Instagram, and I'm shaking my head. I have a few things to say, and if any of you wishes to respond with words, such as "racist", "white privilege" or anything of the sort, please don't and delete me. I think I'm done being nice, not that I've ever really been accused of being nice. I'm known for speaking my mind and letting the chips fall where they may. Now I'm speaking my mind and actively asking people to walk away rather than use words that do not advance the conversation.- Social Media has made us mean, stupid and lazy. People spew words at other people on social media that they would never say to a person's face. It's safe to denigrate the character of individuals and whole groups of people when one can do it from the comfort of a chair, in the safety of their house, behind the shield of a computer screen. If after this is posted you want to call me names or make aspersions to my character, send me a private message and I'll give you my address. Come say it my face. Otherwise, I'm not interested. People accept the things they see on social media and even websites, without bothering to pay any homage to due diligence. We have the whole world at our fingertips with the internet, and yet we blindly share things as if they were true, when it would take a total of 5 minutes to find out they weren't. I responded to one post today that was just like that. Tip: No one is covering anything up if the information you are claiming is being covered up was widely available on the internet five years ago. We share thirty second videos, only to find out that they were edited, and when the full video is shared the story is completely different. The damage is already done. Tip: the correction never gets the attention the original viral video got. We think that changing our profile picture to include a yellow or pink ribbon, a rainbow, or most recently a plain black square is doing something. Tip: It's not. No change has come about because you went dark on social media for a day, or you posted a picture of yourself with a rainbow over your face, or you stuck a cause colored ribbon up instead of your latest selfie. You know what does bring change? Doing something. Turning off your computer, getting off your butt, and DOING something. If you are looking for a list of things you could do to help change what you want to see changed, use the internet for something other social media.
- Refusing to see someone's skin color is not the problem. It has never been the problem, and it will never be the problem. I refuse to see skin color because at the end of the day, skin color is only an outer covering. We are human beings, no matter what the outside looks like. I can say this positively, with no doubt in my mind, because some of my favorite people on this planet do not share my skin color, but that's not why they are my favorite people. They are my favorite people, because they jokingly call me "boss lady" from February to November. They are my favorite people, because when I could barely breathe with anxiety last year, they sat and talked to me and kept me grounded. They are my favorite people because of who they are, not what they look like. Don't tell me because I refuse to see people as part of a group OTHER than people that it somehow makes me part of the problem. A jerk is a jerk, red, yellow, black or white, and there are plenty of those in every skin color. If there are purple aliens I can guarantee that some of them are jerks and some of them are cool people I'd want to call my friends. If you force me to see your color, you are forcing me to see you as different, and my faith tells me that we are all the same in God's eyes. We all have different talents and abilities, but we are still the same. I will NOT "other" people just because it's the newest thing we are supposed to do.
- Stop telling me that our police department, justice system and everything else about these United States of America is infused with systemic racism. Why? Because when I ask you where the systemic racism is, there is no real answer. They use words like "structural barriers" but what are those barriers, what causes them, and how can we change them? No one really wants to have that conversation besides asking white people to accept their white privilege. Then what? Me accepting that I have white privilege doesn't change any of the things that need to be changed. I can decry my own skin color until the day I die, but it won't give a single person of color a leg up. Name the structural barriers for me, tell me what causes them (and white privilege is NOT an answer),and then we can figure out how to change them. You need to have a concrete cause before you can ever come up with a solution on how to fix things, and frankly, racism can't be the cause. You want to say it's the root cause, then fine. You won't ever fix that. You cannot change people's hearts, only God can do that. There are tangible causes that can be fixed, and by golly, white people can even help fix them. I can break this down further, but I'd rather not write a six page blog.
- Stop calling people who disagree racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, etc as a knee-jerk reaction. Some of us would really like to have an intelligent, productive conversation about things, but the second we stray from the acceptable line, we are (insert character denigrating name here). I loved having someone who claimed to be a liberal, tolerant person tell me that the only reason I didn't vote for former President Obama is because I didn't want a "darkie in the white house". I was called a homophobe for eating at Chik-fil-A. I've been called xenophobic, because I think our immigration laws should be enforced. I'm a gender traitor because I'm not pro-abortion, don't believe I should have to finance your sex life, and don't believe in the patriarchy. At least not to the extent that I'm supposed to in order to be a card carrying feminist. All the people who claim I am intolerant refuse to tolerate me. Family has deleted me from facebook. Not for calling anyone names or personally attacking them. They have deleted me and won't speak to me because of what I believe. Wow. I have never harmed anyone based on their sexual orientation, religion or lack thereof, skin color, or political beliefs. I never will. But I will not be called names, or have my personal character crapped on, just because you don't agree with me. The only way to get effectively deleted from my life is to personally attack me or any member of my family or extended family, or anyone involved in my softball league, which I include in my family (brown people too...imagine that!)
- Violence is not the answer. By violence I mean looting, rioting, beating people up, or killing people who you think have wronged you or someone like you. We have a justice system, and as imperfect as it is, when we stop acting inside it and start acting outside it, we have become little more than tight-wearing vigilantes, who often hurt the good people as much as they hurt the bad people. If we want change we have to do it with some measure of restraint, otherwise, you lose any moral high ground you have. Please don't talk to me about the Revolutionary War. I don't believe the majority of our citizens are clamoring for a war. If we keep having violent riots every time something bad happens we will have a war, and that kind of war, a civil war, is trouble that we've not known. Not in our lifetimes. We get to have different opinions, different beliefs, different pretty much everything. We have to find a way to work through those differences without resorting to violence. We have to learn to effect change in ways that do not harm other people. I had a history teacher who explained individual rights the best way. Stand where you are. Reach your hands out as far in front of you as you can and as far behind you as you can. That space, right there, that's where your rights exist. Same thing for everyone. Your rights stop where mine begin. Mine stop where yours begin. Don't infringe on my rights, I won't infringe on yours. If more people realized this, thought this way, acted this way, we'd solve most of our problems without a single piece of legislation passing.
We, as people, have a way of making life far more complicated than it needs to be. We have to have a cause to fight, an axe to grind, an outrage to be, well, outraged about. We have to have mircroaggressions (words) and macroaggressions (actions), trigger warnings, safe spaces, and protective bubbles. If the utopia some people are clamoring for actually descended tomorrow, there would be a whole group of people complaining about something else. Does this mean everything is fine the way it is? Obviously not. We've spent the last 3 months holed up in our houses waiting for the grim reaper to knock on our door. We have two black men and one black woman killed when they should still be breathing today. I would hazard a guess there are far more than that, but those don't really raise our awareness, which is sad, but yet again, another subject for another day. We have a highly dysfunctional, bloated federal government, and as we have recently discovered, highly ineffective and unprepared state and local governments. We the people keep electing the same dipwads (sorry, but there's no better word that wouldn't cause me to start using heavy doses of profanity) and expecting them to do something different. The only way things get better is if we, the down and dirty everyday people who actually make this whole experiment in self-government possible, start doing something different. Talk to each other differently, listen to each other differently, and start expecting more from the people who are getting fat and happy not doing the job we elected them to do. That's how things get better.
Take care, stay safe, and be better, because I know we are better. I believe we are better. And I believe we can be better still.
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