Revolutions 101
Revolution is a recurrent feature of our evolving humanity but it remains a brutal bloody business, defined by both its hard labour and its productive pain. At the centre of any revolutionary action - personal or political - is an irrevocable truth.
You cannot change anything you refuse to acknowledge.
Racism and sexism, misogyny and bigotry are repugnant tenets of the institutions upon which our society is currently built. Think about that for more than a moment. The structural struts on which our lives exist both permit and perpetuate these awful realities. Worse still they take root in us unwittingly, veiled in privilege or the accident of birth that lets us turn a blind eye. Our refusal to even see them means they continue to endure and eviscerate. Now and always if you are not anti, your silence renders you complicit.
The process of revolutionising ourselves is at the base of building a new way and a new world. It is a dual process of unlearning and then re-educating. And it is most often calamity or outrage that pushes us to this sharp edge of our cognitive dissonance. The unlearning part requires us to get uncomfortable. To peer into dark corners starkly conditioned and euphemistically reframed for too long. It is horrifying and shameful and gutwrenching to see their reality as it lives in us, the shadow of a woefully unequal world. But we cannot hope to do a thing about it if we backflip into blissful ignorance, squatting in the comfort of denial or the low blow of gaslighting.
Unlearning is the only way to make space for overdue education. All learning singularly requires you to listen - actively - to voices beyond your own. To listen to those in a position to teach from experience and the wisdom borne of it. If you cannot listen, you cannot learn. And if you cannot learn, you cannot change. Anything. Not a single damn thing shifts without acknowledgement, responsibility and repair.
In uncomfortable times we must bear witness. It hurts as much as ever to feel unseen and unheard by those committed to misunderstanding you, because of what hearing and seeing your experience would mean. But look and listen we must. It is the only way to learn from our mistakes and not blindly repeat them.
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We can do hard things
~ @glennondoyle
Words C. Kerrie Basha 2020