Blank Page Syndrome, and Social Change

Today I was thinking about what I would write about, still being semi-sick I was hoping for divine inspiration so that I wouldn't have to think too hard, I felt lazy. Then around noon my boss called and asked me to step in for her as she was sick. I agreed to this, as I like the experience. But it left me with absolutely no down time. The narrative continues with me going through a flurry of exercises that relate to running the program I work at. Suddenly it was 6pm and I had no clue what I would write about. I pulled my tired body to my car, started the ignition, and drove to school. This was the last day of a sociology class that focused on inequality, power, sexuality, and race relations. And my teacher was wearing a shirt that said, Will Work For Social Change.

I started thinking, what does this really mean? What is social change, and how do we work towards it? These questions started bouncing around in my head as she started to read us an email. This email, well series of emails (yes plural, and yes it is hard to sit and be read emails that are out of context), that she had saved from her correspondence with a very hate filled person.

And I was still thinking this whole time, how do we enact social change? The whole while, about 45 mins, the emails were just being read. The more they went on the more hateful, and racist, and sexist it became. I felt like I was sitting in a room with a roaring fire, just burning each person who sat there, with no remorse, or no morality at all.

The reason my teacher put on this show was because she wanted to discuss how she ignores emotion, and tries to meet people on an intellectual basis. She just wants to name the issues, and this is when I started to wonder...

I feel that so much of learning, and intellectual pursuits, have found that they must avoid, denounce, and ignore human emotion. Yet in my mind, emotion fuels us more than anything. It is something that those who are more highly educated look down upon. Certainly it can be used in vicious, callous, evil, and hate filled enterprises. However, I see this hate, and the power it has, and I see that where there is hate there is also love. I feel that if we could harness emotion and learn to love more than hate, how much power that would hold. It would be greater than any intellectual game that a person could play. To actually with your full mind, soul, and body, love the world, what a difference that would make. To me the "phrase will work for social change" is different than what it is for her. For her it is labeling, understanding, intellectualizing, fighting, yelling, getting angry, and pounding her truth into others. Not that her truth is even wrong, but to me it is a daily struggle to make sure that I love more than I hate. Then in turn by demonstration, I show others. If you can show people love instead of hate, then the labels disappear. They become irrelevant in the face of kindness, compassion, and mercy. We don't need to label racism if people are shown that it is okay to love each other no matter what their skin color. We don't need to label sexism if people are shown that gender doesn't define the value of a person, that they are people and deserve love. We won't need to label hate crimes, if the world is shown that love accomplishes more. No slurs based on sexuality would exist if people loved each other despite who they were in love with.

See social change isn't something that requires people with who have a PhD. It requires the average person daily making the conscious choice to love more than hate.