REACTivists

The Jena 6, Megan Williams, Sean Bell: These are all the latest injustices which have enraged the Black American public and provided endless fodder for the network media. The injustices in these cases are all glaring and grave, but is our obsessive rallying around a few key causes each year hampering our ability to create real change in our society?

Each year these injustices come up- in 2006 it was Sean Bell, in 2005 Hurricane Katrina. Invariably those African-American issues which are on the forefront of American consciousness are those that can be packaged up nice and neat. The injustices are so shocking that they can almost be dismissed as the work of extreme racism so as not to implicate the overall American culture and government. But these cases are only the “highlights” in a miles long list of injustices committed against minorities and the poor in America. How many more cases like Sean Bell’s have there been? Where instead of being a devoted fiancé and father, the victim was a street hustler, instead of fifty shots, there was only one-- straight through the heart.

On his blog, Transform America, my friend Chester Asher writes:

“If we always wait for injustice before we act we will forever be limited. For once the injustice subsides the movement is over… Such an approach abdicates our roles as responsible humans… Doomed to serve as a check on the system rather than a creator of it.”

Also disheartening is the very nature of our responses to these causes. While media attention and raising awareness are absolutely essential to achieving justice, our responses seldom seem to make it past raising awareness. We send email forwards, join facebook groups (the groups for Megan Williams and Sean Bell have hundreds of thousands of members), email congress members, put buttons on our blogs. We write on message boards where narrow-minded trolls make conversations quickly turn inflammatory. At the end of the day we have either patted ourselves on the back for “signing up” for the cause or we’ve wasted potential positive energy on energy draining arguments.

How can we harness the power of virtual communication to make REAL, positive change?

How can we shift from always responding to injustice to actually CREATING the change we wish to see in this world?

An Excert from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Letter to a Young Acitivist During Troubled Times

Mis estimados:
Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.
I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. It is true, one has to have strong cojones and ovarios to withstand much of what passes for "good" in our culture today. Abject disregard of what the soul finds most precious and irreplaceable and the corruption of principled ideals have become, in some large societal arenas, "the new normal," the grotesquerie of the week. It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people's worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

...You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet ... I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is — we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised since childhood for this time precisely.