Reclaiming Our Humanity -Intro Adapted
This little blurb introduces a blog series on Reclaiming our Humanity. This series stands as my own response to myself, and recent posts I have written naming various ills and evils of our world. I began with broad strokes in “The Trifecta of Evil” and picked apart 3 specific issues, and then I started delving into power here and here. I formally started in April, and you can read that first post here.
And I’ve been going pretty strong for the last 2 months, examining systems in various ways. But this week, I want to step back and talk about what a system is more concretely, especially in how it may interact with our lives in unseen and unknown ways.
Reclaiming Our Humanity -A Little Systems Backslide
For the last couple of months as I’ve been writing about systems -about the cruelty of many of our (dys)functioning systems, about the places and ways in which they can be disrupted and affected, about how we interact with them -the evidence for our deep for change could not be more clear. I don’t need to continue to list the brokenness. We live it, and I’ve talked a lot about it all in previous posts in this series. Very few systems in this country work for any except a very few. I simply do not believe that this is who we are, nor that it is an inevitable outcome of any system.
Throughout this time, I’ve also been watching a friend struggle with the tension between individuality and community and it’s brought up many of the same dynamics. Perhaps public health is one of the most obvious places where this tension plays out. We are still struggling with what public health systems should even be doing, and all while we wrestle through our third year of a global pandemic still killing hundreds daily. The necessary requirements of public health have become personal choices, and that undermines the very core of the concept *of* public health.
And yet, at every point of contact or decision, individuals makes choices. Some are actual options to do or not to do, and some choices are so ingrained they are not questioned, simply followed. People wash or do not wash their hands. They just don’t go to a restaurant if they aren’t wearing shoes.
It’s as if each system were a green one, various shades. It’s pieces and parts perhaps different greens, but always green nonetheless. It is upon closer inspection that we discover there is no green, only blue and yellow individual actors. No single person or factor or process is the green of the system itself, but in fact each is navy blue and spring yellow, goldenrod and cornflower. These pieces parts combine, separate, recombine, move about to make the green system work, and the momentum of green pathways whisk each yellow and blue whatsit along.
So the system could be moving in deeply racist ways -a set of biased standards or metrics with access through favored-race networks- without the full awareness of any individual actor. We desperately want to believe that each yellow and blue piece within this green game can make different choices, but sometimes the system itself crowds out any options.
And yet, and yet… it IS possible to disrupt or affect a system. Chaos theory opened my eyes to the potential of the tiny, and transportation theory and practice makes it real for me. I’ve written about this before, and if I can find the precise blog post, I’ll edit this to add it here. But essentially, in the same way that a single accident affects traffic for miles in multiple directions, a single car can slow (or speed up) traffic around it. And if dispersal effect takes place, that single act can shift behavior throughout the traffic flow.
I am speaking at a statewide planning and development Symposium next week, one committed to promoting the principles of justice, equity, and sustainability in how we manage our communities. In addition to my Master’s of Divinity, a degree most systems make you get for ordination, I have a Master’s in City and Regional Planning, and it has been a great joy to think more holistically about change, community, and possibility over the last few months as the Symposium has developed.
I’m still not sure what I will be saying specifically, but I know I will weave the nitty gritty practical themes like land use, transportation, and the management of solid waste into a vision of abundance and possibility based on the solid foundations of justice and a commitment to the common good. It’s all systems work -what do our systems say about us, how do they define us, and what do we want them to provide and do? Where are the disconnects and how can we build what is necessary? We must begin.
We will be well served to more deeply understand the systems around us, how we encounter them, what we can do to affect them. We must engage the powers in order to transform them, we must engage the powers to recall them to their highest purposes. We must stand free of their control over us, the use of fear and momentum, expectation and convention, to dictate our behavior. For we have all we need to build generative and life-giving systems.
May it be so.