Reflections on the Pandemic Journey

Part 1: Marking the end of the Pilgrimage, written around May 8, 2023 

In the spring of 2020, I was taking my last seminary class while completing my parish internship as preparation for ordained ministry. That class, taught by my friend Faryn, was on "Decolonizing Holy Land Tourism," and involved a spring break trip to Israel and Palestine.

We met each week on Zoom from our respective homes around the world as Faryn helped us connect with each other, the complex history of that land, the tragic history of Zionist settler-colonialism, and theoretical and theological notions of pilgrimage. We watched from afar, tentatively, as the SARS-coV-2 virus began to spread, our anxiety about how it might impact our travel steadily increasing with each passing week. In late February/early March, that trip was the first thing to be canceled, the decision made by the closure of the border to Palestine. As we continued to grapple with the larger theological and historical questions (and asked some retrospectively naive ones, like would we be interested in rescheduling our trip for August?), the course became a container in which to process the terrifying transformation of our world. I found myself asking, What if we approached pandemic as a pilgrimage? The result was a collaged map and associated audio tour, which captured many of the images, fears, and motifs of that moment in time while attempting to make meaning of it all. I submitted it as my final project of seminary, and then graduated, on Zoom, while enjoying a nice takeout meal at my parents' house, where I had relocated at the start of the pandemic.

My plan had been to burn this paper artifact at the end of the pandemic, an end which kept moving further and further from sight. The images and tour would stay preserved on YouTube, but I imagined a ritual of release in burning the paper. But when was this pandemic over? When I got my first vaccine? No. Was it the first time I flew after March 2020? No, that wasn't it. Or the first time I traveled back to California, where I had originally been planning to go for graduation, and where I went in December 2021 for the first in-person group event I attended since the pandemic started? That wasn't it either. The collage moved with me, when I left my parents' house for an apartment of my own. With painter's tape I tacked it to a wall, from which it would habitually fall. I kept putting it back up until a month or so ago, when I decided without much thought to roll it up and put it in a corner. Not yet tinder, but no longer the center of attention it had been.

Last week, the WHO declared the end of the global health emergency caused by COVID-19, which is to say, I think, that COVID is with us but is no longer the global threat it had been, which is to say, the pandemic is over. I find those words hard to write because after 3+ years, I've gotten used to living in a time of pandemic. Because I know, personally, more people who have had or have COVID in the past week than I did this week three years ago. But it is true, too, that the fear and the deadliness are not what they were, that we are living amidst something different and we must continue to adapt with that. Finally, it feels like time to burn this paper relic that has been my companion and guide these three years.

But first I must look back and reflect. If this pandemic is over, so is the pilgrimage. Where have I traveled? Where have I arrived? how have I been transformed? What new self has emerged?

Although some journeys are marked by major points of entry and exit - portals, airline flights - nothing is ever as clear cut as we want it to be. The coronavirus pandemic crept upon us, and its ending lacks the kind of celebration and finality we wish we could have. So we make a portal to mark this moment in time. Like a graduation, an ordination, starting a new job or ending one, moving to a new home, all transitions I experienced at least once over these years. In so many ways the before and after are exactly the same, and yet, something has changed.

Part 2: The Journey isn't Over, May 19, 2023

I didn't burn the collage yet. No one came to the bonfire where I planned to burn it, and I felt too painfully alone, more isolated than I felt three years ago when we were all afraid to get within six feet of each other, but kept showing up for each other on the computer screen. As someone without a strong geographically local community at the time, I couldn't feel bad about my limited local connections when nearly all connections were virtual and I did have plenty of those. I was starting to feel like I had local connections and community here, hence setting myself up for the pain of those folks not being available to me. I didn't want to - couldn't - end this pilgrimage there, in that pain of isolation. That is not the destination, not where I am going. I may be wearing my mask less and less but I am still on this pilgrimage because I actually have agency over where I am going. I get to set a destination, and not let the world determine it all for me, like it did when this pandemic pilgrimage began. So where do I want this journey to lead? To connection and commitment and trust, to deeper proximate relationships and partnerships.

In this week since I didn't burn the collage, I've been moving in that direction, intentionally and incidentally. I'm talking to my neighbors and continuing to show up for things, proximity and repetition and faithful risk-taking. There's this great beyond ahead of me, with no knowing at the moment what kind of funding my work will have going forward. I can't know the future, but I can set my compass toward how I want to show up at the cliffs of the unknown. Rooted in place, secure in myself, hands entwined with others.

On the Fragility of Racial Discourse (among white people)

    The world, which is to say, the internet, has been awash these last few months with resources on learning about, addressing, and talking about racism. In the years since Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, more and more white people are finding themselves able to recognize the persistent nature of white supremacist culture in the United States and its institutions. George Floyd’s murder in MInneapolis was a catalyst that reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement and led many white folks to want to better understand this world they live in, and to figure out what they can do to make a difference.

    As this new energy has sought ways to express itself, on the streets and on the internet, the challenges of performative allyship have been brought to many people’s attention. Ally is not a word I generally use, for a number of reasons not central to this post. But I do engage in careful discernment around how I show up and represent myself, and try to avoid jumping on any bandwagon without seriously considering what it means to me, how it will be perceived by others, and what the depth of my commitment really is. I’ve been a part of institutions that proudly wave their Black Lives Matter banner, while Black lives within the institutions have felt diminished. And I’ve been a part of institutions that don’t think it matters if they say anything about Black lives mattering. As a queer white person, I’d rather be part of the former, with a recognition that I generally have power within such an institution to hold at least some space for the discomfort and the work of radically transforming our institutions in life-affirming, justice-seeking, counter-oppressive ways. We’re all, as institutions and individuals, at different places on this journey of dismantling white supremacy, and all white people and traditionally white-led institutions are to some degree racist. (As a white person I am choosing to refrain from making generalizations about people of color - and I think it is important to acknowledge that racism is not simply a black-white issue and is very often internalized much as homophobia and sexism are.) The question is not about being a good (non-racist ally) white person or a bad (racist) white person; the question is, are people with white privilege willing to engage in the process and do the work of recognizing and dismantling white supremacy culture so that we can live in a world where Black lives do truly matter?

    

    One of the more popular, and perhaps controversial, books at this time is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. I think DiAngelo’s book offers a powerful analysis and naming of a dynamic that others have been observing for decades. Reading it helped me clearly see and understand some problematic dynamics that I had engaged in, dynamics grounded in my socialization as a woman. Although I have long been driven by a sense of collective liberation (my liberation is tied up with your liberation), in internalizing White Fragility, I recognized a way that patriarchy had made me more complicit in white supremacy. All the more reason to smash them both!

    Reading White Fragility also gave me a lens through which to notice what I might call “heterofragility,” (though I welcome a better term) when I shared with someone how they had harmed me by diminishing my homosexuality, and they responded with, “But that wasn’t my intent!” And yet, in that moment, being able to recognize the dynamic didn’t help me in any way. Robin DiAngelo’s book may explain why it’s hard to talk to white people about racism (and actually it would be enhanced, I think, with more psychology explaining what is going on in the human brain and body in those moments), but as I recollect, she doesn’t then go on to offer suggestions on how to talk to white people about racism. The book may be better for including that content, but perhaps that’s not Robin DiAngelo’s part to play in this world. The problems arise when we expect her to be the person who can teach us how to talk about race.

    Criticisms of Robin DiAngelo and her work have been floating around since the time her book was published. I agree with those who say that her work centers white people, and in so doing reinforces elements of white supremacy. I have read many books where I think it would behoove the author to do more to acknowledge their identities and those of their intended audience; White Fragility is clearly about whiteness, and DiAngelo, like many of us, is still learning how to use her existing privilege to help create a world in which that particular privilege doesn’t exist. This essay, too, centers whiteness, and I certainly hope no one takes me to be an anti-racism expert!

    I would love to see more respectful and considerate critique of DiAngelo’s work, the kind of deep engagement with the issues that allows us to reinterpret her observations in terms and experiences that resonate with us. For example, the one time I quoted DiAngelo in a sermon, I named her, affirmed her overall project, and then said, “I disagree with her understanding of the concept of ‘assuming good intentions.’” DiAngelo thinks that concept privileges intent over impact. I agree that in practice that can happen, but I believe that to truly assume good intentions, we can go straight to attending to impact because we’ve already assumed that the intentions were good and thus don’t need to discuss them.

    But the problem I’m noting, what inspired me to actually write this essay, is when people I respect start sharing articles that attack DiAngelo personally. (If someone has a personal experience of being hurt by Robin DiAngelo, then I welcome a criticism of her person and not just her ideas. Otherwise, why are we throwing her under the bus?) In this particular case, she’s accused of being a grifter because of how much money she makes off of talking about anti-racism. But DiAngelo’s popularity is the responsibility of the people who have been eating up her words. If people are paying her ludicrous amounts of money to speak, it is because they are so desperate for a solution, for a balm, for a cathartic confrontation with their shame that will release them from its grasp, that they will pay this calm white lady anything to call them out.

    The problem here is not one white woman managing to capitalize on white guilt. The problem is white supremacy culture that thinks we can buy indulgences in order to become ‘not racist,’ that looks for a savior in one white woman (or anyone, really) who has never claimed to be such. There is no quick fix to racism, and no one voice (of any race) that is going to have the answers. White fragility, unfortunately, leads some with skin like me to feel the need to step on others with whom we disagree, rather than engaging with and improving upon their ideas, or directing attention instead to better concepts.

    It’s interesting, even as I write this, to see the traps I’m falling into: I’m spending my energy critiquing white people for wasting their energy critiquing white people, and I somehow think that I’m a better person for it. This is a deadly spiral to be stuck in, driven by feelings of anger and fear, by a desire for respectful (but not necessarily rational) discourse around emotional issues. But is there a way out without first acknowledging the obstacles in our way? This, I think, is the purpose of Robin DiAngelo’s book, to illuminate one of the factors that impedes real anti-racist transformation, so that we white folks might find our way around it or through it or whatever it takes to get past this fragility, so that we can move on to the real work. To expect Robin DiAngelo and her work to guide you through all of the necessary transformation of anti-racism is ungrounded, but her lens just might help free someone from a snare that has been holding them back.

If you are looking for some books on how to talk about race and address racism in real life, here are some great recent books by Black authors: Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want To Talk About Racism, Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Anti-Racist, Crystal Fleming’s How To Be Less Stupid About Race, or Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.

One Voice

 And once again, our world is burning. I’m almost overwhelmed with the numbness I feel, yet I know this feeling well enough to know that it means I am in fact full of feelings but they are more than I am capable of facing right now.

One thing I am not feeling is powerlessness. I write because I know my words have power; I’m still very much struggling with what to say and how to say it, but I saw things today that need to be said.

I was privileged to attend a Black Lives Matter march in Manchester, New Hampshire today. Privileged to be healthy and low-risk for COVID, privileged to work a job where I don’t have to come into close physical contact with people AND I can miss a meeting to go to a rally, privileged to have the means to get there and to feel safe. I went wearing my clerical collar, which I have so far only worn for public protest or ordinations. I went thus dressed with the belief that as visible clergy, my presence carried more power than it would otherwise. By marching in my collar with my “Black Lives Matter” sign, I imagine I am saying that God believes that Black Lives Matter.

Having seen footage from Ferguson and elsewhere of clergy standing between cops and other protestors, changing the tenor of a protest about to get violent by linking arms and singing songs, I went aware that I may be called upon to be a protector or a peacekeeper. I also went aware that I wasn’t prepared to be arrested.

What I found in Manchester, a city I do not know but which was less than an hour’s drive from where I’ve been staying for the past two months, was a spirited and peaceful gathering of about 1000 people (my estimation, supported by some press coverage), led by young black people. I arrived to find a crowd gathered - somewhat though not perfectly socially distanced - in Veterans Park. Someone was speaking into a megaphone words I couldn’t understand, and then the crowd opened and organizers started marching, past me into the street. “Well, I may as well join at the front,” I figured, and started walking. Tears filled my eyes seeing these young black folk proudly asserting the value of their lives, a thousand people marching behind them.

Ahead of the march was a single cop car, slowly escorting us along the approved route. I stayed toward the outside of the crowd - sometimes on the sidewalk, sometimes on the street - so that I could have a large bubble of personal space. I stayed silent, for the most part, aware of how projecting your voice puts more viral aerosols into the air around you, but held my hastily scrawled sign up with pride. I was very aware of how little I know about race relations or the police department in Manchester, to give me local context for the experience.

After a loop along the permitted route we returned to the park. As the park filled we moved towards the street to be more visible. I perched myself atop a granite fence post, which allowed me to see over the crowd. The young organizer wondered, into the megaphone, if a single loop was enough, if maybe we needed to do another, but we were only permitted to do one. His voice sounded curious and casual. I wonder what he was thinking in voicing that; I wonder how he felt about the response. From my perspective he remained calm. But in response to the idea that we should march more than we had a permit for, a couple white people started up a chant that raised the anxious energy of the group. I don’t remember the exact words, something along the lines of “It’s not right! Let us go!” I could feel that the potential was there for the energy to build and the crowd to pour into the street, possibly provoking trouble. This wasn’t what the organizer had in mind. “Black Lives Matter,” the organizer called out, trying to regain control over the crowd that was clearly falling into mob mentality. At first, the other cry of impatient anger continued to drown out the organizer. But by the second or third time he called “Black Lives Matter,” I and a few other voices across the park called back “Black Live Matter!” And the crowd quickly shifted to join in, and the energy settled back down.

That's me in the pink pants and black shirt. Photo from NHPR.

This is where my voice matters, I realized. It doesn’t matter who I am or what I’m wearing. What matters is that I listened, that I have trained myself - in this moment at least - to pay more attention to black pain than white anger. It was my job to amplify the voice of this young man when it was being drowned out. That’s what I was there to do, from my granite perch - help maintain the peaceful protest by affirming the leadership of the black organizers over the dangerous entitlement of white anger and anxiety.

While all this was happening, one of the organizers had gone off, likely to converse with the police about the possibility of another loop. After a number of peaceful chants - “No Justice! No Peace!” “This is what democracy looks like!” - she returned, with the information that we could go around the block as long as we stayed on the sidewalk. And so we did, though there was definitely spillover into the street. Again we gathered in the park by the road; again I found myself a granite pillar upon which to perch.

This time, instead of just leading us in chants, the organizers each shared some words, hard to hear across the crowd but from their hearts, expressing their pain and their gratitude and the need for justice and for white people to do more than show up at marches. Between the speakers there would be chanting, and it was often a bit of a challenge for the organizers to regain the attention. One particular moment stands out. A young white man started an anti-cop chant - “All cops are bastards,” perhaps, though I don’t remember for sure. Maybe it was something less insulting of persons and more critical of institutions, such as “No good cops in a racist system!” Regardless, the angry energy rose — or maybe it was just my discomfort? The organizers were trying to give their megaphone to a young woman, but she couldn’t be heard over this chant. I yelled towards the man - “They’re trying to talk!” - but wasn’t heard in the crowd. I tried to start a counter-chant, hoping that might disrupt things enough to hand off to leadership, but no one responded to my “Black Lives Matter!” “She’s trying to talk!” I cried out towards the young man again, hoping that might be heard. Eventually, some folks near him brought it to his attention that it was beyond time to stop his chant so that we could listen to a black woman.

I’m reading that they are starting to attribute a lot of the damage being done in Minneapolis to white supremacist outside agitators. I believe it, and that may be the case there.  Later that day two white men were arrested in Manchester on felony riot charges, after they disrupted some Black Lives Matter protestors outside the police station. But to attribute all violence and destruction to either a) the police, b) outside agitators, c) white supremacists, or d) black pain, is a gross oversimplification that denies the responsibility of liberal white folks, the kind of people who would genuinely go to a Black Lives Matter march because we believe that Black Lives Matter. What I observed in Manchester was white participants, quite likely “liberal allies,” pushing the crowd towards chaos, towards violent discord, towards potential confrontation with the police.

If I am going to give people like that white young man the benefit of the doubt, then I might say that it’s not that they have their own axe to grind with the police but that they are so genuinely enraged at the violence being done to protect their privileges that they can’t contain it, that they are so hurt at the loss of black lives that they must scream out. But regardless of their motivations, they put their need to speak, to lead, over the invitation to listen. As a white person I go to a Black Lives Matter march as an act of solidarity. I follow the lead of the black people and do what I can to support and amplify their voices. If my pain and anger still need an outlet, I find it elsewhere. White people have a lot of privilege to feel safe challenging the cops, to insult and belittle them and call it justice. But it is the black protesters who are more likely to get hurt or blamed. So check yourself. What are you fighting for? And listen.

Message of Hope, on the Inauguration of Donald Trump

On the evening a January 20, 2017, a group of students at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, along with friends, took to the streets of Oakland bearing a coffin draped in an American flag. We shared the streets with protesters before our funeral procession diverted and headed up Telegraph for a Requiem for the American Dream. I delivered the following homily as part of that service.

It’s been a hell of a week.

On Monday I attended a memorial service for a co-worker whose life was cut tragically short. The extinguishing of her light is a great sorrow, though on Monday we chose to celebrate the blessing she had been and what light she had brought to our community.

Today’s funeral is of a very different tone, because for all the grief that we feel, for all that we have to let go of, this loss is a wake up call, particularly for liberal white people, of all the ways the systems that we have put our faith in fail to protect and uphold the values we claim to hold so dear. The truth is that these systems have been failing a lot of people for a long time. Call it what you will, but the capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy of this nation has been killing people on this continent for centuries. For those of us who strive for justice, who feel sick and afraid and aggrieved by today’s inauguration and everything it seems to stand for, the way forward demands that we listen to the voices of the most marginalized, we step back and offer them leadership rather than simply trying to help the misfortunate other. For white people in particular, now is the time to show our support for the resistance and resilience movements already begun by those for whom the veil of the American Dream had already died - if it had ever even lived. But as Malcolm X wisely observed, “this ‘system’ that the white man created...has done the American white man more harm than an invading army would do to him.” We have an opportunity for those of us who have some privileges, whether we are white or male or cis-gendered or wealthy or whatever form it might take, to recognize the ways in which the promises of privilege and power have been used against us, used to hold us in line and prevent us from truly connecting with ourselves and the world and people around us.

The dominant hegemonic narrative of American history speaks of constant progress, and certainly that idea has been used, by Martin Luther King and others, to help expand privileges and rights to those who had been denied. But the history of this nation is darker and more complicated than that. The election of Barack Obama was the achievement of a dream many believed impossible, but it in no way ushered in a post-racial age.  Now, on the precipice of the age of Trump, we must turn our attention to the stories of resistance in which beauty and hope truly lie – even to those movements that seem to have failed and died.  Cornel West speaks of the “tragicomic hope.” He writes: “The tragicomic is the ability to laugh and retain a sense of life’s joy — to preserve hope even while staring in the face of hate and hypocrisy — as against falling into the nihilism of paralyzing despair. This tragicomic hope is expressed in America most profoundly in the wrenchingly honest yet compassionate voices of the black freedom struggle; most poignantly in the painful eloquence of the blues; and most exuberantly in the improvisational virtuosity of jazz.” What can we resurrect from the ashes of movement past? What can we learn from their successes and failures? What do they teach us about the true meaning of America, a meaning that lies not in the occupant of the office of the President but in the soul of every person walking these streets? Here in Oakland in particular, in a building that I’m told once housed a bar frequented by Black Panthers, what can we do to build upon their Ten Point Program?

I’ve been feeling rather cynical about the American experiment, whether the expansion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is enough to bring ‘justice, equity, and compassion to human relations.’ But America is where we are – even on stolen land, it is the place and possibility that has brought us all together in this moment. And you all are beautiful. You, who are willing to show up and show your pain. You, who are willing to stand up and say that the rhetoric and actions that come from this man inaugurated today do not represent you. You, who are sick and tired of the harm being done in your name but know not the best way to prevent it from happening again or how to make amends for what has happened before. How can I not feel hope surrounded by all this love and goodness and dedication to countering oppressions? As my friend Isabel said earlier today, in a slightly different context, “Maybe we can all love each other.” Take care of yourselves, beautiful people.

As a farmer, a gardener, a lover of life, I find hope, too, in the soil, in the regenerative power of compost, in the natural processes that create life out of death again and again and again. The more time I spend with plants and animals, the more aware I become of the ecosystems I inhabit, the less despair I feel. We are a part of something bigger than ourselves, a world that will continue to offer us ways to take care of each other in the face of whatever the future may bring.

Today, let us bury empire. Let us bury fear. And let us work with all the life forms, visible and invisible, that share this land with us, to transform our shame and our pain and our anger and our tears into new opportunities for life and love and community.

I close with an excerpt from Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let American Be America Again,” which keeps coming back to me time and again. The whole poem is worth reading, but for now let me close with the last few verses:

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again! 

post-election/pre-inauguration thoughts on the American Dream

When they ask me, many generations hence, inshallah, how this happened, I will tell them: we failed to listen to each other’s pain. As I watched the campaign with as much distance as I could muster, I wondered who each side was trying to convince. Maybe I just don’t understand the undecided voters, but I struggle to believe there were that many people who really weren’t sure whether to vote for Hillary or Donald. If people were undecided it was likely between a major party candidate and a third party candidate, or between a major party candidate and voting for a presidential party candidate at all. And is mudslinging really going to win those votes? From the start, I blamed the media for all the free coverage Trump received by being just so ludicrous. At first they thought it was funny - we all did, I think. But then it stopped being funny. If anyone was surprised by the kind of scandals that rose up around Trump, I don’t think they were paying attention.

I was devastated by the results of the election, but I wasn’t shocked. I’ve spent enough time amongst Libertarians and in the Heartland to know how frustrated people on the right and left are with the establishment. A vitriolic comment from a pregnant dental hygienist who had me watching Fox News while my teeth were being cleaned gave me a sense of the anti-Hillary animosity that runs through conservative communities. And of course voters are not rational actors, and never have been. Poor whites voted for Donald Trump for the same reasons they defended slavery nearly two centuries ago. Back then it was the largely inaccessible American Dream of one day owning slaves themselves; today Trump represents the Dream of having great wealth such that one can refuse to be beholden to anyone or accountable for one’s words and actions - a perverted freedom.

I experienced my sorrow over the election results by crying over shrimp. That’s what burst the little hazy bubble I’d been living in for the first couple days post-election. My mom has some moral reason she has forgotten as to why she doesn’t eat shrimp. I usually eat shrimp without thinking twice about it, because it can be so difficult to eat in a way that truly reflects one’s moral values in this world and I have to draw the line somewhere. But that day I paused in contemplating the shrimp soup. One of the many reasons I was hesitant to move into the dorms was because I didn’t want to lose control over my food ingredients. I have access to only a small and grimy shared kitchen, and while though I suppose I could put forth a moral argument that would get me out of the meal plan, the truth is I enjoy the company of dining with my fellow students too much (which has its own redeeming moral value) to want to opt out. I don’t eat the meat but I do eat the fish. That post-election day, I stood there pondering whether the shrimp soup would be delicious and nourishing enough to compensate for its moral, ecological cost, and suddenly I thought to myself, “We’re all fucked. At this point, what does it matter?” I served myself a bowl of soup. I took the soup and a plate of food to the table with my friends, and realized the weight of what I was feeling. I couldn’t eat until I named it, and in naming it, the tears came.

The tears passed, I ate my dinner. Since then, on occasion, I’ve prayed “estaghfirallah” (forgive me god) before consuming something of particularly questionable moral origin. Not that god cares, but it helps me.  In truth, my life felt more clarity and resolve in the post election days. I followed my heart and my dreams - in my schoolwork, in my own life - and pieces fell in to place as the semester drew to a close.

But January is hard. There’s all this energy about new beginnings and recommitments on an arbitrary cold dark day, when one is still recovering from all the feelings that Christmas with (or without) the family brings. The first week brought incredible highs - soaking in the baths at Esalen, listening to the ocean crash on the cliffs below - and tragic lows - the death of a co-worker. And throughout, this creeping sense of doom that I’ve tried to keep at bay but can’t anymore. I’ve blocked out as much of the political hogwash as I can, because I don’t see how this game of coverage is any different than the pre-election one, which clearly didn’t work. If I don’t listen, if I don’t hear about white supremacists in the cabinet (and who knows what will happen to the Supreme Court!), then maybe it won’t affect my sheltered little California daydream. I can take care of myself, grow and love and challenge and most of all increase beauty in the world around me. And then we’ll be okay, right?

For all my extensive studies of social movements and the Holocaust and evil and altruism and change, I feel woefully unprepared for this moment. But maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I would bet that most true heroes of the past did not sit around wondering, “How do I make sure they won’t judge me in the future the way I judge my racist, colonizing ancestors?” Rather, they said, “In the face of horror, how do I maintain the kind of decency that allows beauty to continue to live?” Activist friends, take note: This is not a time to burn yourself out. We need much more from you than your marching, so do what you need to do to build justice and increase love, compassion, and generosity in the coming years.

In the face of my fear of what Friday will bring, and at risk of offending those whose health care is already at risk or in other ways are already hurting, I also feel very strongly the need to recognize this as an opportunity. A Hillary victory would have meant the continuation of business as usual - but Business as Usual was NOT working. Even a Bernie victory, I feared, would not challenge the system enough - progressive policies would come from the White House, but Bernie would likely have been as nearly constrained by the system as Obama was. Obama, who was going to be our savior. Obama, who, as a black man, was our symbol of how far we’ve come. Obama, who was attacked for any affiliation with angry and outspoken others, and even as President of the United States of America perhaps felt he lacked the privilege to speak from that place of crude and open critique in the way that both Sanders and Trump confidently do. Obama, who disappointed us in large part, I think, because we disappointed him.

Obama was able to be elected as the first black president of the United States because he bought into the American Dream, he used it to sell himself. And it worked. I was there, in 2004, when he preached his personal American Dream story at the DNC and was launched onto the national stage. I was sold; I wanted him to be my president. And four years later he was! But the Obama presidency has shown many of us that progress is not the clear arc we wanted to believe it was. Politics is a messy, messy game of egos, the results of which sometimes work in your favor but in a convoluted and expensive way. I have a lot of respect for people who stay in the game for the right reasons, but if we want to get better results, we need to either redesign the board or change the rules. Donald Trump’s victory demonstrates how possible it is to game the game - to manipulate the people, to get passed the checks in the system designed to protect us from demagogues, to treat the campaign like a joke and win. And on one level, he gets away with it because we all know the game is rigged anyway. In a feat of cosmic irony, he played the Trump card. The game is over; to keep playing is futile. We can restart playing the same game, though last I checked that involved a lot of bloodshed, genocide, slavery, environmental destruction and devastation, extinction of species, and just in general exploitation and abuse of everything. Or we can decide that maybe it is time to play a new game. What would America look like if instead of just applying what propertied, Protestant, heterosexual white men had to say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone, we allowed everyone to shape what that means, to name and define the terms of our aspirations? What if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness aren’t the values of progress, aren’t the dreams we want to drive our nation? What if, instead, we found some others, such as justice, love, and peace?

And so, the dream dies and we must lay it to rest. Some of us will just hunker down and try to survive as best we can, hoping in four years to reset the clock, try again, not make the same mistakes, revive the dream. But in the face of climate catastrophe, in the face of Syrian refugees, in the face of the many for whom the American Dream was never a possibility, in the face of all those who have come to these shores or crossed this continent in search of something better, hoping beyond hope that somewhere out here was a second chance, was freedom, was a new beginning, was home, hibernation is not enough. We need a metamorphosis, to rethink everything - home, freedom, family, America - and decide what will rise from the ashes of this dream. Our ancestors, previous generations of organizers, has been fertilizing and cultivating and otherwise preparing the ground for us. We need to decide carefully what we want to plant - but perhaps this time with an awareness that we will never be able to completely impose our will on this land, it too has things to say, and a successful American future is only possible if we learn to work with it. We have so much left to learn, but the work has already begun. Let’s go.

Where the Buffalo Roam, Take Two

Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo...Most of all, the buffalo were part of the Kiowa religion. A white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above.
So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.
There was war between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in the Kiowa country, and the woolly-headed buffalo soldiers shot the buffalo as fast as they could, but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on, even into the post cemetery at Fort Sill. Soldiers were not enough to hold them back.
Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting something as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market. Sometimes there would be a pile of bones as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad track.
The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer.[1]

A year ago, when I moved to Kansas, I mourned for the buffalo. There is a terrible, tragic beauty to this barren landscape, where each year topsoil is lost to dust, what water is left is contaminated by fertilizers and herbicides, and human communities suffer due to their dependency on extractive and unreliable industries. The beauty that remains is in the broad wide landscapes, and the sunrises, and the flocks of birds migrating overhead, occasionally stopping to drink and to feed where the hospitality of the Great Plains still lingers on. I couldn't understand why people would live in this place, land that used to be free and open prairie, now subdivided into monocropped acreage dotted with oil wells. "We weren't meant to settle here," I thought, through images of dust bowl farmers and folks who didn't have whatever it took to make it further along the Santa Fe Trail.

I cried over the buffalo because they are a symbol, to me, of all the violence we have done to this vast and magnificent prairie, to the regenerative biodiversity, to the people who made their homes here, moving across the land, migrating like the birds, and the buffalo. I could cry about the people, but that pain was too great for my struggling, aching, heavy heart. So instead I cried about the buffalo.

A year ago, my sorrow over the buffalo was tinged with guilt. I knew the thrill of shooting buffalo from the Oregon Trail computer game, and believed that overhunting was the cause of the decline of the buffalo. White people, the story goes, contributed to the decimation of buffalo populations by shooting bison out the windows of passing trains, but the natives too did their part, committing occasional mass slaughters of buffalo.

While it may be true that the natives killed more buffalo than were necessary for their survival, and over-eager whites recklessly shot buffalo for fun, this is far from the complete story. The bison population would not have declined so dramatically if these were the sole causes. Rather, the decline of the buffalo population was due to deliberate genocidal policies on the part of the United States government in its attempts to wrest land from the indigenous populations. Destroying the local population’s food supply – in this case the bison herds – was a cruel and effective military tactic.

I only just discovered this truth this week, while reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. A year ago I wrote, “I know why we killed the buffalo,” and I genuinely thought I did. I thought it had something to do with the thrill and exhilaration of chasing down that which is rare and beautiful. I felt a deep mournful sense of complicity in destroying this landscape all because I knew I would have shot a buffalo.

What needless shame I felt! Dunbar-Ortiz writes: “In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and compliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy the basic economic base of the Plains Nations – the buffalo.” (142) It was the army, and governmental policy, that nearly brought the buffalo to extinction, much more so than a bunch of trigger-happy settlers. This doesn’t totally free me from complicity – I am the beneficiary of American imperialist land grabs – but it does help me to see that what happened was about much more than individual actions.

The slaughter of the buffalo and the subsequent land transfer was celebrated by (White) Americans as a “populist” victory of free land to homestead and thus “improve.” The blind arrogance of this makes me shudder, because what they actually did was slowly but surely destroy the land, due both to practices and to a mindset of private property and self-interest. Practices have changed over the decades, but the mindset has not, and the reason we keep failing this land we claim to love, this fruited plain, is because it was not meant for enclosure.

What does this mean for Kansas history? What does this mean for “Bleeding Kansas” and John Brown? I’ve never been formally schooled in Kansas history, but what I’ve heard is that abolitionists and slaveholders fought violently over whether Kansas would be admitted to the Union as a free state or a slave state – as though admittance in one form or another were inevitable, manifest destiny. I celebrate the abolitionist legacy of Kansas, and the fact that this state entered the union “free.” But the truth is that this wasn’t just free land up for grabs. It wasn’t just the bloody deaths of pro- and anti-slavery folks that earned the early “settlement” of this state the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” There were already people who lived on and loved this land we Americans were killing each other over – all in the name of abolition or slavery, depending on what side you were on – and we were just as brutal, and shamelessly so, about killing them and their means of survival. In my research for this sermon I discovered a verse of “Home on the Range” that I had never heard before, which at least acknowledges the price paid for us to call this land home. It goes: “The red man was pressed from this part of the West/He’s likely no more to return,/To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever/Their flickering camp-fires burn.”[2]

I’m going to stop myself before I go too far down the rabbit hole of hating American history. But I will say this: the settlers of Kansas, for all their violence, were pawns in a bigger game. Lives were lost not so much for the sake of abolition or slavery but for a deep imperial urge that ignored the sanctity of life.

We are warned about the tragedy of the commons, the idea that competition over limited shared resources leads to overgrazing, overhunting, overfishing, over-polluting. Climate change is certainly an example of the result of unregulated abuse of resources. But in most cases, climate change included, the true cause of tragedy is not individuals acting in their self-interest contrary to the common good but rather deliberate policies that encourage and reward the abuse and exploitation of resources.  The true tragedy of the commons was like the tragedy of the buffalo – a resource made scarce by deliberate avaricious policy. It is the outsider, the corporation, the wealthy landowner seeking to consolidate his wealth and power through privatization, who disrupts the agreed-upon social rules that serve to regulate the commons.

The enclosure of land in England in the 18^th century led to the consolidation of land and wealth amongst the rich, while the commoners were deprived of certain rights and access to land. In many cases, individuals who were closed out of land in England became landless laborers in the polluting industries of the industrial revolution, or settlers of North America, taking what land they could here and essentially closing out the indigenous people. The commons had been destroyed in practice and in mind, as settlers sought after the privatization of land and wealth they had been denied in Britain.

But it doesn’t have to continue in this way. By recognizing these truths about the commons we can restore faith in individuals’ abilities to self-regulate their consumption. I’ve been at enough occasions where no one wanted to be the one to eat the last cookie or piece of pie – at least not without the consent of the group - to know that our social instincts can often overpower our gluttony. And there are examples, like the Maine lobster industry, of successful self-regulation of a common resource.

I saw a picture on Facebook recently of some protesters at a Trump rally. They held a sign that read: “White people: what are we going to do to end our legacy of violence?” I can’t think of any more important question to ask. Our legacy has done violence to other peoples, the land, and ultimately ourselves. How do we undermine the power systems that are destroying us, and restore the commons for the benefit of ecology and humanity?

One way I’ve been working to restore the ecosystem at Heartland Farm is through holistic management. Holistic management is a decision-making framework designed with the grasslands in mind.  It starts from a point of recognizing that everything in life in a part of a greater whole; if you affect one part of the ecosystem, you will impact all of it in unforeseen ways. Key to holistic management is also the concept that not all environments function in the same way – particularly, it considers the brittleness of an ecosystem, based on both how much rain an area gets and the distribution over the year of that rainfall. In a nonbrittle environment, vegetation thrives in conditions of rest; in a brittle one, rest can lead to desertification. When it comes to implementation, holistic management starts with where you are, what you have, and what you want. The quality of life concerns of the people involved determine what steps are appropriate to work towards our desired ecological impact on the land. Unlike some approaches to sustainability that focus on minimizing our impact on the land, holistic management recognizes that ecosystems develop through the co-evolution of various species of flora and fauna and often having no impact can be just as detrimental as too much of one. The question becomes, how can we have a positive impact on this land such that a balanced ecosystem can thrive?

Historically, the buffalo were central to this ecosystem. Holistic management recognizes that reestablishing the buffalo commons, while potentially desirable, is not necessarily attainable. In the mean time, by managing our domesticated livestock in a way that mimics the behavior of large indigenous mammals across the prairie, we can begin to improve our ecosystems, sequestering carbon, reducing run-off, and encouraging biodiversity.

Holistic management can be used on the small subset of our 80 acres on which I plan to implement holistic grazing just as well as it can be used by someone managing thousands of acres. This adaptability is one of its strengths, but it privileges larger land bases, which closer approximate the whole of an ecosystem, which gets to one of my concerns, that agriculture needs to be for the people. How do we protect the ability of the public to benefit from the land, and the land to benefit from the people? Dan O’Brien, in his book Wild Idea: Buffalo & Family in a Difficult Land, writes: “Nobody knows how many protected acres is enough to ease the Great Plains ecosystem back from the abyss of industrial agriculture. But one thing is sure: while it is true that a small operator with a good heart can help set the tenor of the debate and the action to come, it takes an outfit with the ability to amass huge pieces of land to actually do something significant. To date, only government agencies, large conservation organizations, and very wealthy capitalists have the wherewithal to affect the future of the Great Plains. I had no access to, and little faith in, any of those entities.” (33)

The collective management of land, rather than the parceling out into sections according to an unnatural grid, is really the only way to impact an entire ecosystem. But in our current paradigm, that usually means the consolidation of wealth and land in the hands of a few. Our government and conservation groups, though well-intentioned, are subject to so many different sets of interests and conflicting scientific approaches that they become ineffective. Which leaves us with corporations and wealthy individuals, who even with the best of intentions are not accountable to the common good. An individual also cannot see all of and cannot know all that is best for an ecosystem, and we must recognize that humans are part of the whole that is our planet. We must manage with regards to the quality of life desires of everyone within our whole, our community, our ecosphere; if we don’t, we will suffer unintended consequences. We have to think about the social impact of our ecological decisions. Enclosure was the true tragedy of the commons, the loss of shared land and shared responsibility. Maybe we have to start to shift our ways of thinking about private property and land ownership. Maybe we need to find ways to more intentionally cooperate with our neighbors. Maybe we need to learn a thing or two from the indigenous people who lived here before us. Maybe we need to learn to work with them, to follow their lead. Maybe this is what we can do to end our legacy of violence.

While I was preparing this sermon my friend Aly shared this statistic with me: “According to a 2008 World Bank study, areas in which indigenous people occupy or control their traditional territory encompass 22 percent of the world's land surface and coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet's biodiversity.”[3] Those are powerful numbers. Indigenous cultures tend to affirm biodiversity with a reverence that settler cultures do not. As you go forth today I invite you to think about, in the words of Pope Francis, “Care for Our Common Home,” but particularly the question of how we fight the imperialist urge, in our culture, in our government, and in ourselves. In 1854, James Griffing, a Methodist minister, wrote of “the consuming avarice of the white man” as they claimed land from natives in Kansas Territory.[4] We are clearly not the first generation to think critically about this wrong. But maybe we can finally change. We must.

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[1] Quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 143.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_on_the_range

[3]http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/12/cap-and-clear-cut/

[4] http://www.territorialkansasonline.org/~imlskto/cgi-bin/index.php?SCREEN=immigration&topic_id=88&search=American%20Indians

Worth, Dignity, and Environmental Justice

Sermon delivered November 8, 2015 at Prairie Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Hutchinson, Kansas.

Now I know you are all expecting me to talk about climate change and climate justice, and I’ll get to that, but to start I’m going to talk about television and drugs. Last weekend I finished watching the first season of The Wire. For those of you who don’t know, The Wire was an HBO series of the last decade that looked at the drug scene in Baltimore from the perspective of the cops and the dealers. Hopefully I’ll be vague enough that I won’t spoil it for anyone who might want to watch it.

            Among those involved in the drug trade, there are some who are more sensitive, and have more of a conscience, than others. To be clear, none of them could care less about the addicts whose lives are destroyed by the drugs. But as bodies start adding up, of innocent and not-so-innocent alike, it starts to weigh a little too heavily on some souls.

            At one point a pivotal character in the drug trade, after arrest, finally turns and agrees to testify against the drug syndicate, in return for his own protection and chance to start over. But then his mother shows up and convinces him to rescind his statement and do his time for the sake of his family, whose wellbeing and privileges rest upon the money the drug empire brings in. The argument is clear: the system must be protected at all cost for the people who benefit from it. And the people who benefit most are not the ones directly involved. The kids who are actually selling drugs on the street are treated as expendable; they might gain some pocket change and respect but they are still poor kids just struggling to get by. It is people like the mother, who never touch the stuff, who benefit most demonstrably from the system.

            By now, you may have figured out where I’m going with this. The situation of this corrupt drug empire in Baltimore is totally analogous to our own climate-destroying systems – particularly fossil fuels and conventional agriculture. The loudest arguments in defense of these destructive systems are the ones that say we need them to keep living comfortable and secure lives. As though upper-middle-class respectability were the end all and be all and we could all achieve it if we just play our cards right.

            Both we and the drug dealer are caught in a Catch-22. How far are we willing to go to protect a lifestyle built on the exploitation of others, a lifestyle that gives us comfort and security but not necessarily meaning, a lifestyle that will always be threatened by the forces of good at work in the world? The character on The Wire took a twenty year sentence, because, as his mother reminded him, the alternative was too scary and lonely – to start over, all on his own, in a totally unfamiliar environment, and never be able to see his family again. We hopefully don’t have to make that choice – our families won’t kill us because we disagree with them about the environment and economics – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Who in their right mind, with their retirement tied up in the stock market, is going to rail against that institution? Who, who has worked tirelessly to provide for their family, to make a living in rural America off of oil or agriculture, is going to turn against the institutions that have fed them? It is only when situations become too horrific that we have whistleblowers from ExxonMobil or Monsanto.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that on some level or another, we all care about the environment. We like having clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. We like to go hiking or biking or hunting or fishing, to watch the sunrise or the migrating birds, to hear the wind through the grasses or see the snow on the mountain. And we all want a world where we can continue to enjoy these things, where our children and grandchildren, and future generations of humans, can enjoy such things. But it’s easy to take a livable earth for granted, because we’ve always had one. Likewise, it’s easy to take our own bodies and their abilities for granted until they are threatened. Earlier this week a ladder slipped out from under me. My body did everything right to save me from as much harm as possible and I am in awe. I eat well and get plenty of activity and generally speaking try to take good care of my body. But this incident reminded me how important that is. If my upper arm strength and balance and ability to land weren’t as good, I’d probably be lying in a hospital in a cast right now, instead of standing in front of you with some bruises and chipped teeth. Sometimes it takes having something dear to you, something essential to you, threatened, in order to remember how important and valuable it is.

And now the situation is dire enough that more people are starting to pay attention – powerful people. Even the Catholic church has taken a stand. Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Laudato Si, has been a powerful contribution to this movement, in particular to the conversation on the connections between environmental and economic exploitation. In general, Christians and other people of faith are slowly starting to speak out in defense of the climate. And on Friday, President Obama finally rejected the Keystone XL pipeline. I’ll admit I haven’t been a part of this battle, but for my friends who have been involved in the struggle for years, this is huge. It’s huge for the rest of us too. The nature of our political system is such that a politician will usually only do the right thing if it’s politically viable. Obama blocked the permit for political reasons: to strengthen America’s position in climate negotiations, such as the upcoming Paris talks. But what this means is that it is now politically viable for a politician to take a strong, impactful, and controversial stand against climate change.

            To me, one of the most significant things about this victory, and the thing that has made this particular struggle more about justice than just mitigating climate change, is the leadership of indigenous peoples. In so many ways this is the heart of the issue. This planet may be our “common home,” but once upon a time this continent was not our home. My ancestors and probably most of yours showed up and decided that if we could exploit the people and resources here, we could claim the land. From the early colonists to the Homestead Act, the thinking has been that if you can make it work out there, find utility from the wilderness, it’s yours. As though there were no other people here already, people who found value from the land in ways we couldn’t even recognize.

            We know what we did to the Native Americans was wrong. We teach our kids that the Trail of Tears was a stain on our nation’s conscience. But when are we going to learn to listen to them, these people who first gave Europeans the knowledge and tools they needed to survive on the harsh shores of Massachusetts and elsewhere? Do we assume that we have so destroyed their culture that they are no longer capable of teaching us what we need to do to survive?

            Or are we finally learning to listen and let them lead?  Obama did not cite indigenous concerns in his statement on rejecting the pipeline. But the resistance of tribes, alongside that of ranchers and environmentalists, is what forced the issue.  The Keystone XL pipeline was more symbolic than anything; other pipelines exist, the tar sands are still being mined, oil is still being shipped. But something is shifting, and we need to keep pushing that shift in the direction of the world we’d like to live in.

So what do we do?

Honestly, I think the biggest thing we can do is to talk about it. But not in the fear-mongering way, gosh no. In a here-are-my-ideas-on-how-we-can-create-a-better-world way.  Because we already live in a world with enough fear. Recently I was in central Missouri and picked up a local newspaper. One article featured the assignments of a fifth grade class talking about themselves by filling in the blanks: “I am _____ and ______. I feel ______. I see ______.” Etc.  And it was upsetting for me to read how many of the kids feared that the world would end soon. Is this what we are teaching our kids?  I don’t think we should be protecting them with lies, that everything will be all right when we have no idea, when in fact we know that we have been squandering their future. But it’s when people are scared that they start grasping and stop appreciating. If you are pretty certain that there’s no hope, you stop working towards a livable future, and it’s that lack of perspective that justifies extractivism, the taking of what you can get while it’s still there and before anybody else. But we don’t need to grasp for oil to have power, we don’t need to grasp for power to have light, and we don’t need to grasp for light to see. There are other ways. Learning to listen to other cultures, particularly native ones, is one way to explore how we can reorient our relation to the planet. Another is to learn from the natural systems already at work. Biomimicry. Permaculture. Holistic management. Natural systems agriculture. There are a growing number of approaches based on understanding ecosystems and life forms, rather than forcing them to work for us.

Feminist theologian Sallie McFague suggests the metaphor of the earth as the body of God. I’ll admit I’m not that familiar with her work, but it intrigues me. In general I do believe that our attitude to the land and to natural resources is symbolic of our attitude towards life overall. I believe that if we can’t treat the land with reverence and respect, as something of value in its own right beyond what it can provide to us, we will never be able to treat each other with that respect for inherent worth and dignity either. And to me, the land is essential because we are created out of it, Biblically and literally. We all need to eat, and the process by which our food gets to our mouths binds us to each other and to the planet.  To go a little sacramental on you, every bite is a communion, but whether it is holy or otherwise is up to us.

The UU community prides itself on its leadership on justice issues, and I think that despite our disparate views, theologically we have a lot to offer the climate justice movement. The Dominican Sisters that I currently work for often note that they’ve never heard a sermon on the environment, and I think it is safe to say that these women have sat through more sermons than almost anyone else on earth. Yet I think it would be odd to sit through a year of UU sermons and not hear about the environment. In his address at The Land Institute’s Prairie Festival this year, Wes Jackson joked that a Unitarian would care about even the poorest of soils, while a Methodist probably would not. And I think he’s on to something here. Mountaintops don’t have the best soil, but that doesn’t mean we should take them off to get to what’s underneath. And this, I think, has more to do with inherent worth and dignity than the traditional environmental principle of the interdependent web.

            There’s an element of some Christian thought that says, We are all unworthy, but God loves us anyway. And on my most broken feeling of days, this can be comforting to hear. But as a Unitarian Universalist, on a basic level I disagree. I believe that despite our brokenness, we are all worthy – of God, of life, of all the blessings of the world we might experience. This doesn’t mean we have earned these blessings, and we should feel humbled by them, but we are certainly worthy of them. Our worth is inherent. But it’s not just human worth that is inherent. It’s not even just animals that have worth. Everything that is, is important, regardless of if we can figure out a reason why.

            We’re still in a Catch-22. We’re standing where we are today upon the shoulders of others who don’t really like being stepped on. But what if we recognized that these people and things have worth beyond what they do for us? What if we stepped down, and moved forward together? Imagine all the places we might end up.