It’s important to remember that the world has been broken for a long time - built upon white supremacy, exploitation and greed. The answer to that is not to fix or cure the world of its brokenness - there is no “normal” to return to. There is only navigating the brokenness in a way that reveals the beauty of who we are beyond the lie of separation.
How we show up for this moment is entirely up to us. Will we take more than we need out of fear and self-preservation? Will we exploit essential workers or appreciate and protect them? Will we allow our undocumented and incarcerated communities be discarded and denied basic human rights? Will we continue to tolerate a government that bails out out corporations over people? Or will we demand better of ourselves and our country?
Rebecca Solnit reminds us:
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
Kerri (she/her)
As Amazon, Walmart and others profit amid Coronavirus crisis, their essential workers are planning an unprecedented strike [[link removed]]. Get ready for May Day. [click to tweet] [[link removed]]
Is ‘Wellness’ Just Being Well-off? [[link removed]] How the privilege of wellness is showing its true colors in this pandemic. And it’s not cute. [click to tweet] [[link removed]]
Is wellbeing the new GDP? Jacinda Ardern is letting her budget be dictated by what best encourages the “well-being” of citizens, [[link removed]] rather than focussing on traditional bottom-line measures like productivity and economic growth. [click to tweet [[link removed]]]
There is no simple way out of the predicament that Biden and his allies have created. But feminism should make you uncomfortable [[link removed]]. And that is exactly what we are feeling about the 2020 election prospects. Ugh. [click to tweet [[link removed]]]
We are in the middle and the end is not in sight. Rebecca Solnit on letting go and uncertainty in a story that never ends [[link removed]]. [click to tweet [[link removed]]]
Essential workers risk their lives and their families’ lives every day — they deserve appropriate safety equipment, standards, and job guarantees. On May 1, International Workers Day, we’re taking action with essential workers everywhere:
SOLIDARITY: The working class keeps us alive. As consumers, we are not separate from the problem. Do your part by joining the action on May 1 from wherever you are [[link removed]].
BOYCOTT: The way to really leverage your privilege is through your consumer power. Show your support by boycotting/unsubscribing to Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and FedEx.
SUPPORT: Essential workers are showing up for all of us. Here’s how to help the essential workers in your life avoid burnout. [[link removed]]
Stop saying we are all in this together. We are not. And this moment is demanding a more complex analysis of a toxic system and culture that determines who gets to be well and who doesn’t. Understanding this helps us locate ourselves in relationship to what we (really) need and how we can best respond. We’ve all lost something to this virus, but that does not mean we all need the same things. Equity demands that we locate ourselves in relationship to power and privilege so that we don’t take more than we need AND can redistribute money (stimulus checks), resources (groceries) and power (leadership) to those who are most impacted. It also relates to how we take action in times of crisis. Deepa Iyer created this mapping exercise [[link removed]] to help us locate our roles in the social change ecosystem. Identifying the “right” actions in times of crisis requires both radical self awareness and relationship to the whole. It says that while we are are all interdependent in this web, our roles and responsibilities are different. Our ability to show up with the nuance and skill that this moment requires will determine who we become in the future that lies beyond this pandemic.
Attribution Deepa Iyer, SolidarityIs and Building Movement Project
Priya Parker dropped some serious wisdom on the latest CTZN podcast [[link removed]] about how we gather and make meaning in times of physical distancing. She encouraged us to lean into the discomfort that comes with truth telling and conflict and allow for the more beautiful conversation to come forth. Check out her new Together Apart podcast [[link removed]].
Publish on Substack [[link removed]]
© 2020 CTZNWELL. See privacy [[link removed]] and terms [[link removed]]