What Would I Give Up for a Just World?

When people find out that I served in the Peace Corps, I often get asked how I did it. Being so far away from everything I knew to live and volunteer in another country. The implication being that such a choice was extraordinarily selfless, and out of reach for most. 

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. How many good, well-meaning people there are in the world who think they are helpless to do any real good. 

Peace Corps volunteers, or community activists/organizers, or social workers, or insert any other so-called do-gooder profession here, are not inherently morally superior to any other group. All groups will harbor their share of racists, misogynists, elitists and jerks. Pursuing a meaningful life does not automatically make you a better person. 

The premise that to do good requires radical steps out of line with a conventional lifestyle is a deflection. The people who lament the soul-less-ness of their corporate jobs are turning their attention away from the ordinary choices they can make to advance a more just world. There is no career that would absolve you of your collective responsibility to other people.

The last few years should have taught us to stop putting people on pedestals. What kind of work can be accomplished from a pedestal? We won't find liberation there.

Can we start to see that we are the ones we've been waiting for? That we actually are not waiting in some kind of consequence-less limbo? Every day, we make choices to either maintain or challenge the status quo. There is always an opportunity to learn more about the real effects of our decisions and an opportunity to do better. Things like gentrification, school segregation, income inequality, wealth and achievement gaps are the results of ordinary people going along without questioning too much the history and nature of our connections to one another. We want to live and make a living as if our individual actions are only personal, but we all share in the continuous making of this world because we exist here. 

Sometimes because I am always in that liminal space of refugee and American citizen, I think of roots as this missing path I'm supposed to be traveling back on to a previous foundational moment. I am forgetting that roots continually grow into the ground. Not just to hold me in place, but to expand an exchange of nutrients. How am I being fed by the systems around me? What am I feeding with my decisions about where I live, how I raise my children, what I support? What kind of roots am I putting down? In what kind of soil?

It's both difficult and easy to change. Much like I can do a lot of the things I do because I do not know what I am doing. I fall short all the time. My children see that. All the ways I've failed to show up for them, for myself, for others. Then they see me try again, try something different. I have no interest in living a pristine life, an immaculate life that takes no risks and touches no one. Giving up the pursuit of perfection has been what allows to me to move towards a more just and ethical existence. If I'm not looking for the perfect way to make a difference, or the perfect cause, or the perfect moment, I can see all the contours and ripples of my present actions and see how much power there is in change that's as simple as opening a window to air out a room.