Religious vs. Secular

The terms "religious" and "secular" are often used to divide both people and activities into two groups: spiritual matters and the concerns of the world. It makes it sound like you have to be part of a specific religious tradition to concern yourself with anything beyond the material plane. It also makes it sound like religious people are completely separate from the material world, that they don't concern themselves with worldly matters at all.

I prefer the terms "vertical" and "horizontal." "Vertical" referring to inner growth, mastery of the self, growth that allows us to be less reactive to our environments, less conflicted and doubtful, more confident and present and loving. The spiritual. Internal peace and balance. "Horizontal" meaning outer growth--mastering our existence in the physical world, developing skills and talents, learning to care for ourselves and others, take good stewardship of resources, learning to get what we want and negotiate our way with others. Thriving in a material sense.

Nearly everyone alive is engaged in both of these forms of growth.

There are some extremes where people renounce one or the other. Nuns, monks, artists and recluses will give up the horizontal. No more attempt to survive and thrive in the world of people and things. All concerns focused on the relationship of the inner self to the Divine All. Then there are people who allocate time to inner growth only as a means to maximize material growth. Any self improvement is focused on maximizing material gain. I don't think I've ever met a person like this, but I believe they exist: people who renounce the vertical plane.

But the rest of us, Christian, new age, pagan, Muslim, atheist, Jew, etc. are concerned with both. 

"Even as ye have done unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me" and "Love one another as I have loved you" equate well with the humanist ("secular") belief that because we are all born onto this planet together, and we have the ability to empathize with one another, we should treat each other as well as possible, just as we'd prefer to be treated.

There's a great parable about a guru who tells a young student, "You are Brahman. You are God." and the student says "Wow, I am God!" He's walking through the streets, still marveling at this idea, and he sees an elephant coming down the road. The driver yells at him to get out of the way. He says "If I am God and the elephant is God, why should God get out of the way of God?" So he just stands there. The elephant wraps its trunk around him and tosses him out of the way. He's very shaken up by this, and runs back to the guru and tells him the story. "I thought I was God!" the guru says, "You are." "Why should God get out of the way of God?" and the guru says "But why didn't you listen to the voice of God telling you to move?"

Consider the language of the vertical, the spiritual. Inner peace and affirmation. Confidence. Warmth. A burning flame.

These feelings are experienced by a wide variety of people under a wide variety of vertical experiences. In affirmation of God. Or many Gods. Or no God. In response to nature. Or self-denial. Or self-care. Or unity with a group. Or disengagement with one.

So maybe, then, regardless of who is absolutely, end-all, be-all "right," it's equally important to listen to other humans, all of them, as it is to listen to God as He or She or They talk/s to you and yours.

As a good friend of mine said, "In God we trust, and God is us." We must trust one another. We must not wait until others become more like us. We must trust and listen to them now.

Righteous Wrath, the Great Distraction

Believe me, I of all people understand how compelling righteous wrath can be. How difficult it is to resist that infuriating comment on your friend's thread. How important it seems to use just the right words to explain why that other person is terrible, why their beliefs are damnable, why their way of being in the world is a threat to all that is good and holy.

The last post, "The Cliff," offers one reason to put that attitude on the shelf. Here's another very compelling argument that may give you pause next time you feel tempted to ride the wave of justifiable anger.

The Cliff

We are a world on the brink. Many of us feel a great deal of fear. Fear of the future, fear of one another, fear of losing what little we have left. We are stampeding towards the edge of a cliff.

Those who have paid attention to the stories of stampedes passed down by the generations before us understand exactly which cliff we’re headed towards.

The cliff is hatred.

At the bottom of the cliff is the realm of terrible deeds we shuddered over as children, horrible acts we could hardly bring ourselves to imagine, the sorts of things from which entire generations never recover.

For too long, we have listened to, and repeated to one another, a story of how the masses, i.e. most of us, are foolish. Ignorant. Incapable of governing ourselves. How we are hateful and poor in spirit and undeserving of more than we have.

It feels like a loving story when we say to ourselves and the people we love that we are not like the rest. We look out for our circle, the way no one else does. We are kind, intelligent, decent, and well-intentioned, the way no one else is.

We deserve everything we want. No one else does.

No one else does. These words are the dogs driving us ever closer to our collective misery and doom. Every time we turn to condemn one another, they grow more powerful. Every time we ignore the evil within and the good without, they grow more powerful.

The sheep at the front of the herd are the easiest to blame for the direction we’re all headed. The ones who can see the edge of the cliff already and who, instead of turning back, are screaming “CANONBALL!” Yet their confidence comes from the noise of the rest of us thundering on behind them in the exact same direction.

Here is the loving story: We are not better or worse than one another. We are all good. We all do evil things. We are all intelligent. We all do foolish things. We are all well-intentioned. We all hurt one another.

If only we could break free of the tight, fearful pack, we could verge off, away from the cliff, to the right, to the left, back the way we came, whatever makes sense to each of us, and make it to safety. But the ones on the right are fighting back against the ones on the left, and the ones on the left are pushing hard against the ones on the right, and most of those are pushing hard against the ones in the front, so we’re all stuck in a tight pack, running hard towards disaster, blaming one another all the way.

We are all capable of governing ourselves. Together. As long as we listen to one another. How bad must things get before we assume the mantle of responsibility? Before we trust that we can do a better job than whoever we’ve trusted with the task thus far? Before we stop saying we’re powerless and start proving that we're not?

Give it long enough and it won't matter whose fault it was. It won't matter which part of the pack we were in, the front, the sides, the back. 

So let's not.

It can be extremely difficult exchanging ideas between people who see the world very differently from one another. People have such different associations with different concepts,  different ideas of what is healthy and virtuous vs. insidious and upsetting. So I'm working on establishing some extremely basic definitions for use across belief systems. We need a common language to remind us of our mutual interests, like the need for respect, like the need to ask others what respect looks like to them, like the need to care about the answer.

GOOD: When we are nurtured

EVIL: When we are destroyed

The vague revolutionary "they" catches a lot of flak so I'm pretty proud of this new definition, which applies to everyone, regardless of creed, party, faith, or socio-economic status. 

THEM/THEY: Those who act without regard for us

Every time we make some excuse not to have another's interests at heart, or forget to, or choose not to care, we join THEIR ranks. See, people don't often set out specifically to do evil. More typically evil is a byproduct of that disregard that goes along with their actions.

US: Sentient life, all of it, regardless of creed, nationality, education level, socioeconomic status, race, gender, philosophy, and, importantly, behavior (i.e. even THEY are US)

Those few who do specifically set out to do evil to others, of these Chilean director, shaman, and philosopher Alejandro Jodorowsky says: 

"a criminal (does not) exist who bears all the guilt: 

all individual crime is a product of the family, the society, and history." 

Pain comes from pain comes from pain. As another of my favorite artists, Zak and What Army?, said, "We're all escaping from the same hell"; the hell of the love we needed and didn't receive, the love we needed to offer and couldn't bring ourselves to, the hell of our failure to properly appreciate the love we do give and receive every day.

But the question remains: what do we do about THEM? They are, after all, hurting us, and allowing them to continue doesn't exactly show regard for us. 

First, whatever we need to do to make ourselves safe (without becoming THEM), and second, whatever we can do to help THEM become one of US again.

Our aim for THEM can never be anything other than accountability and rehabilitation. Desire for retribution, vengeance, any wish of pain for another, is THEIR territory. By definition. 

It's pretty understandable to want to punish some stranger as much as possible, to want to go easy on our loved ones. Protecting people from consequences is not loving. Important lessons are learned from consequences. Natural consequences are often the best spur for moral growth. And saving the really bad consequences for the people who fall outside of our circle of love is the perfect way to convince others to stop caring at all about OUR welfare. Like a FutureThreatsToOurHappiness machine, churning out more THEMs by the minute.

There is a philosophy of the universe that says there is enough to go around, enough for all of us to have what we want and need to be happy, yet in order for that to happen, we need to accept that everything might not happen exactly the way, or according to the timing we prefer. We can get what we want while still allowing the same for others. In fact, it's the only way to go about getting what we want that holds any promise of lasting happiness.

An Open Letter to Brock's Dad, aka Everyass

I don't know you, but I see you. You could be any entitled rich white ass. You could be every entitled rich white ass. You are Everyass. You are the poster child of Rape Culture, White Culture, Might Equals Right Culture. Because it’s all the same thing. 

What I can take was always mine, and will be forever, hallelujah, amen.

You’re still in caveman tribal mode: Good Guys vs. Evil. In that fight, you're justified in using whatever it takes to survive, no matter what. Smash and destroy and betray and disregard and overpower. Take what you need and want. Survive. No time for integrity. No time for compromise. No time for anyone else’s needs but your own. That's the price of success. As the media has been in such a hurry to point out, your golden boy was caught raping a woman at a top university. His swim times are phenomenal.

Surely though you can see why, when you claim he’s too delicate for the sort of consequences the rest of us suffer out here, here in this fantastic dystopia that you, Everyass, and those like you fight so hard to create, our rage begins to grow.

When you don’t bat an eye as families are torn apart and parents languish in literal slavery, when you don’t seem to think brown and black children are too delicate to grow up without parents who dared self-medicate with weed instead of OxyContin or Prozac or Xanex, but god forbid your rapist son spend six months in jail for condemning an innocent woman to a lifetime of trauma, our rage grows. Maybe you’re right; maybe jail is so cruel and unusual that even the cruelest and most unusual criminals, like rapists, shouldn’t be subjected to it. If that’s how you really feel, it’s about time you got more upset about all of your fellow Americans being subjected to it for far lesser reasons. 

The truth is, you don’t care about justice or liberty. What you really want is a personal, consequence-free zone for you and yours. And the more you succeed at this, the more you protect your children from any experience that would allow them to relate to, care about, and grow into decent human beings alongside of the rest of us. Money can stand in for a lot of personal growth. It has clearly saved you and your terrible spawn from ever learning a damned thing from life. You've nurtured a careful inability to understand that other people experience pain, too. Well done.

Empathy is not a small trait to be missing. The ability to balance your own needs and desires against those of others is a baseline skill for participation in a community. Your son caused another human being grave harm. He should suffer over that. You should feel anguish over that. If you had this basic decency I'm talking about, which you're going to need if you don't want to be voted off the island one of these days, you'd be examining your teachings, thinking about what attitudes you hold and convey about the value of other humans, the beauty of individuality, the inviolable sovereignty of a person over their own body. Maybe you couldn't have done any better but maybe you could have, right? Maybe a rapist son is a good wake-up call, a good time to re-evaluate your ethical model of the universe?

Sir, this is what it looks like to care about others besides yourself: you'd tell your son to spend as much time and energy as it takes to help with this woman's healing, to understand what she's been through, to do anything he can do. You'd encourage him to bow his head and accept whatever consequences society sees fit to give him. "Don't think only about yourself and what you're going through, son," you'd tell him. "That's what got you in this mess in the first place. It's time to start thinking about what experiences we provide for others; what kind of world we're creating for the people in our lives. It's time to understand, from her side of things, what experience you forced on this woman that night."

If you had the baseline sense of empathy necessary to thrive in a community, you would recognize that the most important fact about your son right now is his demonstrated willingness to violently sacrifice another human's welfare to his whims. He is a threat to intoxicated women everywhere. You shouldn't protect that. Your son's delicate monsterhood doesn't deserve to be preserved!

What you call love is better known as psychotic overindulgence. A loving father wouldn't be trying to explain to the world about his son. A loving father would be doing everything in his power to help his son connect the suffering he will experience now to the suffering that others experience; the suffering that woman experienced. A loving father would be trying to help his son forge a new sense of self through adversity, shaped in important ways by the magnitude of the pain he has caused another.

I hope you figure out in time that the Everyass way of life is dying.

Sincerely,

A More Generous America Than You Should Expect

How to Shed Your Faith Without Losing Your Soul

Churchgoers! I’m here to tell you the good news! God did not put anyone else in charge of you. You’ve long suspected and feared this, and I’m here to tell you: it’s true. Each of us is a direct conduit of the divine. None of us needs someone else to interpret divine will for us. We are it.

This thought may fill you with fear. The fear of responsibility. The fear of accountability. The fear of losing what is most precious to you. Religion has been your comfort, your foundation for your sense of self, for your relationships. You may wonder what meaning your life could have without it. What if I tell you that everything you cared about when you were religious, you still care about when you’re not? Your family. Your friends. Making the world a better place. Becoming a better person. Loving those who despitefully use you. Helping those in need.

Religion is just a scaffolding to help us “fake it til we make it,” so to speak. If you can see the point and feel the benefits of living a life that is honest, useful to others, and focused first and foremost on loving one another, you don’t need religion.

The sense of specialness you get from being exclusively in tune with God, the sense of piety from denying yourself pleasure, the anticipation of a much better afterlife, these things are nothing next to the peace of mind you attain once you give yourself full permission to address cognitive dissonance and begin taking full accountability for the outcomes of your beliefs and actions. Those special, light-bathed moments that confirm you alone are connected to the divine? Everyone has those moments. Everyone is connected to the divine. Literally everyone. And it’s awesome.

Your faith’s structures are fantastic. Don’t stop using them. Keep coming together, singing, enjoying the holiness of community, presence, and worship of the divine. The feelings you feel are real. It is holy to sing together and celebrate the fact that we are here on this planet, the great mystery of our existence, it is holy to bring ourselves in tune with one another, it is holy to gather and experience love!

Instead of locating the divine in something far above you that demands you fit yourself carefully into a box through constant war with your own urges, listen intently to the individual path on which you are being guided, trust yourself, and celebrate divinity in the people around you, in the coming together, in unity.

Keep visiting one another. Keep seeing to it that every human being has invested humans looking out for them. Keep taking care of the sick, helping beleaguered new mothers and visiting the elderly. Encourage others to do the same and offer them venues without first demanding that they align their personal moral universe to match yours.

Keep your rituals. When we engage with the physical world, we communicate with the unconscious. As above, so below. Open up your temples to all who are willing to be respectful inside of them. Let them see their own rituals through. The symbols of others are not in conflict with yours. The rituals of others do not contradict yours. There is room for everyone.

Keep doing missionary work. Send your missionaries everywhere, teaching people to love and respect themselves for their own divinity, and to love and respect others for theirs. Don’t stop doing the good work. Keep it up. Shed the skin of conformity. The demand that you live your divinity by suppressing someone else’s is designed to free you. Let the hypocrisy unravel your faith; it's supposed to.

Religions all carry within them the key to breaking free of them. The very first of the Ten Commandments is “Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.” What do you think a human being standing in for divinity constitutes besides something coming between you and God, standing literally “before God”? Jesus Christ said that God is love, and that your only commandment is “Love One another as I have loved you.” Do you find that your faith makes it harder for you to love others or to receive the love that others feel towards you? Do you sense the intense wish of your unconditional love to flow free and unrestricted towards all, instead of stopping short when it encounters certain behaviors and ideas?

God is us! God is all! Free yourself! Surrender yourself to love!

Love Vs. the American War Machine

There's something you need to know about. It's called the American War Machine. 

Maybe you have an idea of what I mean; maybe you don't. But once I tell you, there's no going back. You can choose not to believe me, but unfortunately these things are well documented and the information is widely available online.

We're coming up on another election. Another charade of choice. When Jill Stein was trying to fight her way into a televised debate in 2012 she told reporters,

“Ninety million voters are predicted to stay home and vote with their feet that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney represent them. That’s twice as many voters than expected for either of them."

Our current president now has the support of less than half of the people of the United States. Our confidence in the structures of power is already gone. So what does that mean for this next election? 

Obama told us he was going to close Guantanamo and bring home our soldiers, and we believed him and we voted for him. But the Barack Obama we sent back to the Oval Office in 2012 has a kill list. He personally approves drone targets. Sometimes he will approve a strike even if the target is with their family. This practice has become an excellent recruitment tool for Al Qaeda. 

Most of us don't even know half of what our country does with our implicit approval. It's a horrifying thought, but it's also an empowering one. So listen up.

America has the meanest military around, by a lot. Whatever values we once stood for, our MO now is pretty much "we have the might, so we have the right," aka "fork over your lunch money."

Occasionally, one of the countries we've been taking advantage of gets it together enough to democratically elect a leader willing to push back. We're all about democracy, so we applaud them, shake their hands, and listen to their demands, right?

Wrong. We find some psychopath who's willing to be bribed, arm and fund his military coup, and say we've just conquered socialism.

I say “we” and “our” like we’re choosing this and/or benefitting it, when the opposite is true. We've all been pillaged, too. The vast majority of us can't claim a fair livelihood, a home of own, access to the world at large, proper medical care, regular meals, even. 

We are not powerless. We are literally the opposite. We are the labor, we are the power that makes the world go round. We can and should be beautifying our own communities, investing in things we collectively value, healing the world, and doing work that contributes to all of our well-being. There is enough food that no child need starve. There are more empty buildings than homeless people in the average city. Think of all the service organizations, all of the infrastructure, all of the communities that would benefit from more hands, more love, more attention. Think of all of the job creating we could do together if the bulk of the world's resources were in a public fund for the world's improvement.

Both parties love to call the other side brainwashed. The ironic thing is they’re both right. We’re all brainwashed. We’re brainwashed into deferring our dreams indefinitely. Even our most urgent and noble dreams. Like making sure our grandchildren have a planet to enjoy. Ridding the world of unnecessary suffering. Creating a society where taking care of one another is the rule instead of an admirable exception.

We have the technology now to vote directly on every issue that effects us. It could be an app that we check daily. Which bills are up for debate today? Ooh, the jobs bill. I vote for this bill only if Section 3 is deleted. I'm not sure what's going on with this one; let me go watch the condensed debate on youtube. Of course, there is no reason for the people in power right now to make this happen. If we want true democracy we have to demand it.

It's going to take trust in one another. We've got to stop giving in to our fear and hatred when it comes to people who see the world differently than we do. Hatred is easy. It makes us feel protected from our fear, but the cost is high. Love takes nuance. Balance. Love means respecting one another's desires, even when we don't agree with them. Love is the language of functional communities, of real democracy, the idealized, shiny, bright version we got in elementary school, the kind where everyone wins and no one loses.

We don't see a lot of examples of how to do this. People rarely reach compromises on televised debates or talk shows. If you believe the television, you’d think it’s literally impossible to make decisions that everyone can be at peace with. I’ve personally reached good compromises on gay marriage and abortion with my very Mormon, very Republican parents, compromises which leave everyone's values intact and don't threaten anyone's way of life.

Democracy isn’t failing. Its mechanisms have been subverted. It's time to update the systems. Get this machine running the way it's supposed to. Decentralize power. Put it back in the hands of people and communities. Get people talking productively instead of destructively again.

Everyone wants to be the hero in their own battle of good vs. evil. This is your chance.

Do you believe we should all have a say in what happens to us? Do you believe the world's resources should be used to nurture the world? Should people's labor go towards things that benefit them and the world at large?

Speak, people. Speak for yourselves.  Speak for democracy. #directdemocracynow #lovevsthemachine

The Sleepwalkers

Black children don't deserve to be protected by police, they deserve to be shot by both officers and vigilantes because their appearance is one we associate with violence. Mexican mothers don't deserve sanctuary from the violence brought on by America's bogus Drug War--they deserve to be separated from their children. Muslim families don't deserve access to the same safe shores that received our great- and great great-grandparents. The safety and comfort of white people is more important than the very survival of others.

How do these kinds of heinous beliefs flourish among a population which declares itself to follow the precepts "love thine enemy as thyself, turn the other cheek, even as ye have done unto the least of these, ye have done unto me?"



The collective obliviousness of white people is a product of many things; a system of K-12 education which portrays all events in history through a "white equals right" lens, the media's misrepresentation of people of color as more dangerous and likely to commit crimes than white people, behind-closed-doors government policies of housing, loan, employment, and policing which herd people of color into ghettos and jails.

It's super lame that it's taken white people so long to wake up to all of this. It is very, very lame that they don't realize all by themselves that all of the articulate, big-hearted, intelligent POC's they know are emissaries from, not exceptions to, their cultural background. It is very, very lame that they allowed themselves to be convinced that the achievement gap had more to do with white culture being extra awesome and other cultures not so much, rather than do the small amount of research it takes to discover the actual causes of disparity. It is utterly, utterly lame that when white people look at the suffering of a person of color vs. a white person, they have a whole different set of standards for what they consider "the way things are" vs. what they find infuriating and unjust.

White people are beginning to wake up now. Voices of color are beginning to hold equal and in many cases superior sway (as should be the case when they speak about issues they are more familiar with than white people). Thanks to the increasing maturity of the internet, the collective debate is reaching a point of equilibrium. The intellectual elite is near unanimous in its intolerance of white ignorance, and we are beginning to experience the classic conundrum of revolutions: once the people who have been on the bottom get to the top, they have every incentive to recreate the cycle of oppression by humiliating and taking out vengeance upon their oppressors.

Only this time, it's not just the former oppressed perpetuating this cycle. It's also guilty former oppressors, seeking to exempt themselves from retribution, real or imagined. From ivory towers, the elite rain down righteous condemnation on poor white America, the brunt of our collective frustration towards ignorance, racism, exploitative policies, etc. finding an easy target in these dregs of the country. What is wrong with them? Why can't they seem to shake the spell of their racist pied pipers and join the ranks of smart, compassionate, worthy, non-racist human beings?

As someone who grew up with a keen sense of the economic injustices perpetrated against the population at large, I can tell you that it's an uphill battle not to be ignorant and white in a conservative state--a battle you don't properly realize you're even fighting; a battle you constantly get the uneasy sense that you're losing. You feel vaguely uncomfortable about the seemingly obvious superiority of your culture over others. Whenever you're in the company of people of color, you can tell they find you ignorant. You can tell they're angry. You can tell you're always saying the wrong thing, but you can never quite figure out just what it was you did. Maybe you're not always graceful about the fact that whites are superior, but what are you supposed to about it?

When I took a domestic diversity class and began to deconstruct "white equals right," one thing that struck me was how often my classmates insisted that most white people were *choosing* their ignorance. Their insistence that white people were *choosing* to capitalize on their advantages, knowingly and gladly at the expense of people of color.

Understandable...but problematic.

It takes a lot of humility and patience to undo a lifetime of conditioning. Frequently I was frustrated, frequently I felt myself reverting to my trained, automatic (and thus, easier) way of seeing the world. I want to believe, but I can't say for sure that I would have followed through with changing my views had I not benefitted from a patient, invested, and wise teacher helping me along the way. The way you feel you're being treated now might be a good way to understand how students of color feel in most other arenas besides this classroom, she suggested. Awesome advice, which I took. There is a certain amount of reckoning to be expected, some of which can be turned to the advantage of revolutionary work.



Imagine waking up and finding out you've been sleep-wreaking carnage on people around you the whole time you were asleep. Imagine you are confused but horrified, and you want to make it right, but they don't seem to want your help. "You've done enough here," they say.

There are many, many other sleepwalkers. You think you might have some understanding of them. There is still a great deal of carnage being wreaked, and it seems to you that it should be a first item of business, figuring out ways to wake the sleepwalkers so they'll stop hurting people and start helping in general.

"Of course you would focus on the sleepwalkers," you're told. "Just like a sleepwalker. So egocentric."

I understand now that my Irish ancestors threw their black friends under the bus in order to be white. I know it's an old story and that most people who share my skin color have ancestors who were willing to let someone else occupy the bottom rung of society just so that they wouldn't have to. I understand now that Nixon and his advisers singled out people of color for a lot of suffering that I got to avoid. Does either of those things mean that I am by nature belligerent, hateful, and willing to take my pleasure at the expense of others? 

I'm a new-ish human. Nobody told me about those things at birth. They were disguised from me along the way. Now that I have a better sense of history, I interact with the world differently. I do everything within my power to counteract these systems, as I would expect any compassionate person to. Who does it benefit to insist that it is not the business of anti-racist activists to figure out ways to awaken the sleepwalkers? Who does it benefit to insist that they actively choose sleep and carnage?



As long there are people we can point to and say "this class of person is not worth attempting to understand, collaborate with, or love" we will be easy to control. This doesn't just go for the racists; it goes for the people who have the capacity to understand and help them but instead choose to mock and condemn. Fully acknowledging that some people very understandably don't have that will or capacity.

The problems we face collectively here on Earth don't come down to race or class or gender. Privilege magnifies things--less privilege means you suffer harder, more privilege means you can exploit on a broader scale--but the essential problems, likewise the solutions, are not the province of any one group of people. Those who are attuned to our common survival are going to behave in ways that reflect that; those who are concerned only with their own survival are going to reflect that in their behavior. They're going to try to exploit everything they come across to their own ends. There are people at every level who feel left out in the cold by the rest of us, and there are reasons for them feeling that way, and there are things we can do about it.

"White is wrong" culture is scaffolding to help us build a better world. It's not a permanent fixture of that world. America has been tuned in to the "white is right" channel for a crazy long time so we need a healthy dose of the opposite just to upset the default position. It's good to remember, though, that the exploiters benefit from both "white is right" culture and "white is wrong culture" inasmuch as they both keep us divided. Both discourage us from understanding or communicating with each other. Both turn actual human beings into unrecognizable caricatures perfect for reinforcing our worst ideas about one another.



One of the things we can start doing is making a clearer distinction between our condemnation of the people who actively create and maintain systems of privilege and the people who passively benefit from them. Poor white people are deluded into thinking they're in the same boat as the exploitative classes just by virtue of their skin color. We can stop feeding that delusion by acting as though all white people are oppressors by default.

The "Olympics of Oppression" is a well known concept within the anti-racist community. The general takeaway is "pain is pain, stop trying to assert that you have it worse than others and start trying to make things better for yourself and others." Does it make sense to draw a firm distinction between the suffering of people of color and the suffering of exploited whites in the work of liberation? Our oppression may be different in both degree and kind,  but we all have a common enemy: exploitation at the expense of community.

Now a lot of people are making a lot of noise about how stupid Trump supporters are, which only feeds into everything they're told about a liberal elite that gets off on feeling superior to others but doesn't actual have any moral meat to it. Alternately, there are some people offering hugs at Trump rallies. Sometimes we just don't have a hug in us for someone who has made our lives miserable. I get that. But hugging is greater than scorning. Internet culture will be truly grown up when our collective rhetoric shifts from a call-out to a call-to-duty model, where instead of ridiculing each other's worst selves, we remind one another to keep rising to our best selves.



I'm not saying that it's a negative thing for much work of liberation to focus on people of color exclusively. That's both positive and necessary. I'm not suggesting that all those who have a grudge against white people should just get over it. That's ridiculous and reductive. I'm saying that the tone of the collective conversation needs to change if we're ever going to get anywhere collectively. I'm saying that if we're tired of oppression, we should pay close attention to what feeds into it, and what interrupts it. 

Right now there's a great, miserable barrier of people who have been born and bred into ignorance. Those who hold the truth are the only ones capable of banishing lies. And it is disrespectful to the humanity in all of us to assume that anyone would choose to live a lie that hurts others if they were able, by themselves, to come to understand it for what it is.