Day 90
right
I have made much of the middle ground. As a person who clings ever so humbly, but tenaciously, to pacifism, I struggle to “take sides” because to do so seems to press me into a fight rather than peace. It is one of my greatest challenges to know what is worth fighting for, and when. I love pacifism because it offers a way of resisting that does not capitulate to ways of being that create more harm and isolation. It seems idealistic, but also true; nearly impossible, but also a more sustainable solution to our divisiveness and pain.
I have realized though, that sometimes, there is a true right and a true wrong. We will not always agree on what it is, universally. Even when we do agree on what is right, we often find that there are those of us who work tirelessly to advocate for what is right and those of us who believe that what is right is an unattainable ideal which we must talk about (lest we slip forever into degradation,) but that we can never really hope to embody.
Embodying what is right is difficult, because most actions, right and wrong, are convoluted by the histories, the intentions, the agendas of those committing the actions. i.e. one can give endlessly to the poor out of guilt and/or a desire to seem righteous, without ever really seeing the poor or engaging gratitude in a way that transforms charity from an act of guilty-conscious to one of true sharing. One can commit terrible abuse as a result of a history of abuse endured by themselves, never having felt at all empowered to do the right thing, only to perpetuate a cycle of pain that they cannot see a way out of.
While articulating what is right seems somewhat easy (caring for the poor, creating equality, being kind, at the very least,) I have struggled with how to hold myself or others accountable to doing the right thing, knowing how complicated we are and how challenging this can be, depending on our own complex experiences. How can I ask a person who was abused daily by their own parent, to embody the right thing as a parent? How do we demand justice and equality from a system that both dictates and reflects our own desire for individual success at any cost? How can you begin to mount the soap box and cry out that you have been wronged, that you know the right way, when you are always enmeshed in your own messy compromises?
Here is one small insight:
When you are right, you feel the weight and grief of the perpetrator’s actions; and you feel it not just as something done to you, but to them and to your shared community as well. You realize that the pain you are feeling is just one part of what is happening to them and to the world that you both live in. You see how their brokenness is perpetuating more brokenness and how you both are caught in that together. This person, or system, or community that wronged you, so that you want to destroy or escape it, is inescapable because we are all connected by our humanity and the planet we share. This truth is the one that cuts deepest, and is also why we must sometimes take a side. Not the side of this person or that person, this or that ideology, but the side that seeks to acknowledge our connectedness and serves the interests of all for the sake of all.
When you have been wronged, and you know exactly how, and you feel rage and fury and pain like a tornado inside, but you know that you have been truly wronged because mixed into those emotions is the deepest heartbreak that those who have wronged you didn’t even see you as you are in the first place. You are right when you know that the judgement brought down on you has little to do with you, and everything to do with the pain and spiritual, emotional and mental poverty of the perpetrator.
You are right when you know that you cannot completely extricate yourself from that perpetrator’s actions or reality, even if you never speak to them again. To see and know and articulate what is right, is not to transcend this world—it is only to see it for what it is. But here is where hope lives: if we can see and know what is right, even if it is only when we are deeply wronged, we can use our pain, we can begin to live into what is good for everyone by abandoning the idea that we alone, individually, are whole.
