We talk a lot about privilege and we talk about urgency. Probably one of the biggest mistakes that we make is we always wait until we cannot afford disunity or we cannot afford to be ignorant to try unite and to try to come to know about one another.
Maybe we wait too long because we have restricted the definition of peace to calmness in my life and in my circle. For example, if I have peace in North Dallas, then there is peace, no matter what's happening in South Dallas. If I have peace in my life in the sense of calm, then the poverty that exists outside of my life, is not a disruption of that peace. Therefore, I don't feel compelled to strive for peace.
If we have peace in America, and you really should think about this for a moment, because probably 9/11 shook the whole America and every mass shooting shakes America, as it should shake America up and probably we would hope that we recognize in a time when the American government is literally dysfunctional and when that society is this deeply polarized and when things are this bad that we can't afford to wait anymore, and one of the things that we should push a little back on, is to say that was there truly peace before 9/11? Was there peace before mass shootings became a daily norm? Is my peace disturbed by being conscious of the lack of peace that exists in other parts of the world, sometimes due to the bad foreign policy of my government. Is that on my conscious?
I am disturbed by the lack of peace, that that child has at the Tijuana San Diego border, I am disturbed by the lack of peace that that child in Yemen has, I am disturbed by the lack of peace that the child in South Dallas has. My conscious does not allow me to have peace even if the effects of that lack of peace aren't showing up on my doorstep, I am disturbed.
So, when we talk about peace, we talk about justice, you know there is a saying that,
Justice can't be Just Us.
If we truly want to expand our hearts, we have to expand our worlds and we have to expand our view of the world and we have to expand the burdens that we are willing to take upon our expanded hearts.
Don't always wait for something to show up on your doorstep and that's what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, probably the most appropriated figure in the history of the United States, most celebrated yet neglected, said that,
Peace is not the absence of tension, but it's the presence of justice.
So, long as injustice persists, inequity persists and I have something that I can do about it and I don't, then I need to push myself to do a little bit more, even if that lack of justice is even to my benefit.
Privilege has responsibility, all of us have some layer of privilege, what are we doing with that privilege to benefit those, that have been robbed of it, or do we only wait until it becomes too violence, too tense for us to be able to persist in our own privilege.
So, make yourself uncomfortable before you get uncomfortable. Make yourself uncomfortable, because there's too much discomfort that's out there that we're called to heal and probably that's how we set ourselves apart.
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