06.01.2020 | Happy Pride Month & The Quiet of Inclusion

I have so many questions, but I don't have many answers. I feel so much pain and anger, but I don't have the words to express them. I have so much I want to do, but I don't know where to start. The last few days (on top of years and years of experiencing and thinking about these things) have been physically, emotionally, and cognitively taxing to so many of us, and we are searching for something...anything...that will ease the anxiety or soothe the pain or just help us understand. Many of us are looking for something big - a national voice to unify us or perhaps an announcement of some sort of change at the federal level or maybe just acknowledgments by law enforcement officers that they are getting it wrong over and over and over again. We are looking for something big that matches the vastness of the injustices that have been experienced, the number of lives lost, the hugeness of the pain felt, the heaviness of the everpresent anxieties. I don't think we will find that big thing anytime soon. I'm not sure that big thing even exists.

What I've realized in the decades of doing this work is that hatred is loud, but inclusion is often quiet. Hatred is sharp and dramatic, but inclusion is...it's actually pretty dull.

After 60 days of following all the rules of sheltering in place, my daughter insisted on going to the protests in downtown Chicago on Saturday. Armed with masks, hand sanitizer, and water, I went with her. Yes, we saw several skirmishes between police officers and protesters. We saw some protesters rock a police van back and forth until it almost tipped over with the officers inside. We saw buildings getting tagged and we saw some police officers who were anything but kind to even the most peaceful of the protesters. All of this was scary and ugly and very well-covered by local and national media. Later on that night, there were looters (most of them were not part of the protests during the day), and they were also very well-covered by local and national media. Our local grocery store, Walgreens, and Starbucks were looted. They are all now boarded up. We have National Guard tanks just a few blocks from our home, and we had to show identification to get onto our street yesterday. All of this is scary and ugly and sharp and dramatic and very well-covered by the media.

But, all of this isn't all of what's happening. The scary ugly stuff is sharp and loud. The majority of what has been happening though is quiet and kind of dull. Thousands of people marched in Chicago on Saturday, and even thousands more were in their cars, in a city-wide gridlock, honking their horns for the marchers and to voice their own pain. The gridlock was all over the news, but when you looked closer, what you saw was that the people in the cars had cases upon cases of water and containers of sanitizer. You couldn't go a block in any direction without someone offering you water and the opportunity to sanitize your hands. People passed out snacks (individually-wrapped, of course!) with gloved hands. People passed out masks and gloves to anyone who didn't have them. I saw a young black man approach a white police officer who didn't have a mask and offer him one; the police officer took it and thanked the young man. I saw a group of young white men start taunting the police, and two black women stepped in between the young men and the police officers and pacify the young men. Several officers quietly said, "we are with you" and "we hear you" as the protesters passed by them. The majority of our experiences were like this - small interactions that were quick, quiet, and beautifully compassionately dull. We saw the media pass right by these small interactions over and over again in search of the loud not-so-dull big stuff.

We were all out there for a serious, heartbreaking, big reason, but we were a diverse (in race, ethnicity, gender, abilities, sexual orientations, ages, etc.) group of people who didn't know each other who exchanged hundreds of kind and inclusive interaction with each other - interactions that were too dull individually to make anyone's news feed, but collectively, they were everything.

As I've watched the news over the past few days, I have thought about the sharp ugly stuff that happens in our workplaces that gets everyone's attention. The truth is that sharp stuff is never the largest part of the story. The dull stuff of quiet respect, soft kindness, and subtle compassion is everywhere around us...it's just not the stuff that catches our eyes and holds our attention.

I don't know where we are going to end up in the next few days, weeks, or even months. But, my experiences over the past few days have reminded me that inclusion doesn't make the news. Inclusion isn't exciting and loud. Inclusion is quiet and soft and dull in comparison to the sharpness of disrespect and hate and violence. The thing about inclusion is that when it is happening, we don't notice it because we feel good and valued and respected and supported. Inclusion is happening even in the middle of this pain and anger and anxiety, but it won't be televised. We have to look for it, appreciate its quietness, and know that nothing big is going to get us out of this big mess...it will be a momentum of small acts of kindness, humanity, and love, and if we pay attention, this momentum may give us a path out of this pain. That doesn't mean that we stop fighting for the large scale changes in systems. It just means that what fills us up today so that we can wake up to fight another day is the quiet of inclusion.

I hope each of you is staying safe and healthy.
Please take care of yourselves and each other.
Arin