When I close my eyes I can see everyone I’ve lost standing
together like they’re waiting for me, and they remind me then that my life is
just a little part of a bigger story.
In years to come I hope people will think of me as a girl
with a story worth telling, a story that is the mixture of a million particles,
all taken from the people who came before me, melded together to create one
person and one life.
I hope when they look at me they’ll see elements of my
father who said the earth may be big, but every step we take brings us closer
to truth and who believed that each blade of grass is unique and like me, is
just a single element of an infinite universe.
I hope they’ll think of his legacy, which is the
continuation of my own, built of people who spent more time worrying about how
to best grow a single carnation than how to build an empire.
When I think of this, I don’t feel so alone, because I see
them there, my father, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, my friends and
teachers, standing beside me, showing me that the world I forget to see, even
when it’s just beyond my door, is extraordinary.
That the mountains have been climbed by people greater than
us, and that each building has been built stone by stone, so that we can live
in the midst of a land sewn together by each small rock and rushing river,
working in unison to create our earth.
I will think of them this way. In comparison to the land
they loved and the land they conquered. I will remember my uncle by the wells
he drilled one by one, starting with nothing but a quarter and ending up with
billions. I will think of him as being proud and working hard, to build his
life and to add to mine.
I will think of my father as a man who treated the land like
a loyal friend, watching for ways to preserve it, to fight against oil
companies and industry, so that one day his grandchildren could stand on the
same mountains he stood on.
I will think of my grandmother as the woman who raised my
mother. I will thank her for the ways she changed my life with her own legacy,
and how each lesson she taught my mom has been taught to me, so that every
generation can be a little smarter, a little kinder and a little happier than
the last.
In years to come I hope people will see all of them when
they look at me. That they will understand that I am just a moment of a longer
story. A story that has many characters, each who fought and struggled and
grappled with decisions, so that I could have my moment, my chapter, so that I
could do something great.
I hope they see the other side of the truth, that hard men
have loving families, that oil tycoons and horticulturists have lives in
common, connected by loved ones of loved ones, proving that we are like the
grass and rocks, all fragments of a single entity.
In years to come I hope people will see all of them when
they look at me.
https://vimeo.com/88948994
ReplyDeleteIt was not until I came to college that I was exposed to ideas like power and privilege. The first of what I consider to be the start of my awareness of white privilege was birthed in a class titled: Intercultural communication. In order to learn about other cultures and how they assimilate as well as remain part of their own entity; we must learn first about ourselves through a process called introspective reflection. Until this exercise, I was never really aware of my privilege.
I am a white, heterosexual male who was raised Catholic and also had a small Jewish influence as well. My heterosexuality, gender, and race were never called into question or hampered relationships or perceptions about my personality or achievements. To be totally honest, I never even thought about the inherent privileges of being white, male, and heterosexual. When I scraped my knee as a child, the band-aid always matched my skin tone; when I went to business dinners and meetings during my time as an intern, I was surrounded by people of the same color as me; When I saw short answer problems on test that had slight reference to a male and female relationship, or heard stories like Jack and Jill, nothing ever stuck out as different. The way people talk in our society normalized my privilege so much so, that it had never become a conscious thought.
In relation to school; we did learn about oppression, especially that of race, sexuality, and even classism but we were never asked to be reflective on our own experience, unless your experience was one that was on the disadvantaged side of privilege. Remembering back to K-12 history lessons, I always remember feeling detached from certain things that we learned, such as manifest destiny, and the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. I felt disconnected because I felt like I did not contribute to slavery or racism and I sure didn’t contribute to essentially killing of hundreds of Indian tribes, stealing their land, and sometimes enslaving the native people. In retrospect, I still do not feel like I am personally guilty of these injustices but I do believe that I owe it not only to the people of the past but also to myself and future generations to have such an awareness of privilege. With this awareness we are better suited to have empathy, communicate more genuinely and in turn learn more about one another as well as ourselves.