And while we’re at it, we can imagine a world in which the place that is a safe place for everyone is called Everyplace. This is what we’re here to do: to make the world a beautiful place where there is no place that any human being, regardless of color, creed, or country of national origin, is not safe with other human beings. After that, if you really, sincerely want to get out of your car and pat the angry grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park, that’s on you. What we do not need to do is behave like angry grizzly bears to one another. We don’t have that luxury—or there will be nothing left to fight over, and no one left to fight over it.
Safety does not come out of the barrel of a gun. It never has, and it never will. “Love one another” isn’t just a nice religious teaching; it’s the whole user manual for life. As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, we must learn to live together as brothers—and sisters, we might add—or we will die together as fools. In any conflict, the two “sides” are not arbitrarily defined groups. Team Learning to Live Together as Brothers and Sisters and Team Die Together as Fools cut across all the lines.
And if we’re bracing for a backlash as we do our work, we can remind ourselves that in the vast majority of cases it’s not a backlash, it’s a further lashing by a system that requires copious amounts of lashings to stay in place and, like people caught in an abusive behavior pattern, doubles down on the abuse when it’s obviously not working, even though abandoning it would seem to be the winning strategy. We will not be afraid and we will not be moved, and we will stay focused on healing. We’re Team Learning to Live Together as Brothers and Sisters.
Going on into some action
Bearing in mind that wringing our hands and saying how awful a thing is is not an action and will not make the world a better place, we can recall the words of Malcolm X—“Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action”—as well as the words of Fannie Lou Hamer—“You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap”—and with our sense of who we really are in full bloom, we can go beyond individual healing and actions and into the realm of putting energy into working for what we want, instead of putting all of it into fighting against what we don’t want—and into truly making amends.
78