Remember you are all people and all people / are you
In yet another hotel room after two days of transit; one of those long flights with intermittent-at-best WiFi that has you wondering what is happening in the world as you’re offline in a metal tube for hours on end.
There are times when disconnection is a relief and there are times when it merely delays the inevitable flurry of updates about yet another US government agency firing staff and cutting programs while reinforcing in rhetoric and action that for very many people rights are merely contingent on executive caprice.
However much one might need to or insist upon seeing the world as an exercise in partisan politics divorced from “well who can say what is really in their minds and hearts”, there is something else that is true: right now, in the United States, the mere existence of certain kinds and classes of people in or adjacent to certain spaces and rooms to which they previously had even limited access or exposure is being treated as an affront, an offense, an outrage, a crime. This is neither a theory nor an abstraction nor an exaggeration; this is a description of prevailing facts.
That such descriptions might provoke discomfort or unease does not mean that such descriptions are inaccurate or unfair.
That our instinct to equate “this makes me feel bad” with “that cannot be true” is something that is powerfully exploitable.
Attribution
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe. Remember you are all people and all people are you. Remember you are this universe and this universe is you. Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you. Remember language comes from this. Remember the dance language is, that life is. Remember. — from Remember by Joy Harjo