Find Your Humanity!

Written November 24, 2021

The other day, one of my husband’s friends started his day by jumping into their WhatsApp chat group with a rant about people with a certain medical perspective. One of the other gentlemen in the group proceeded to then ask what on earth had triggered this explosion in a space that had - up until then - been a place for banter and civilised, open-minded discussion. He went on to explain that his frustration was because he had a situation on his hands where he was going to have to let a number of the employees of his very successful business go because they refused to follow the medical mandates that had just been announced.

His situation is not unique, neither was his opinion.

As my husband and I chatted later that morning, tears of grief welled up in me. Grief at the growing awareness that we have some friends who cannot see through the segregation game they’re being manipulated and bullied into playing and, more importantly, cannot question their willingness to entertain discrimination. All I could think was: WHERE IS THEIR HUMANITY??!!

A few days later, we met up with two families from my children’s school. It was a beautiful evening with different tears - tear-inducing laughter - and for a while I was reminded how beautifully uncomplicated we humans can be. There was, however, one moment that smacked me in the face reminding me that on some realm of consciousness we are not. One little boy, who I have not met, came up in conversation and the discussion went something like this:

“I have never met his mum, but I know she’s an anti-xyz’er*. I was told she’s an anti-xyz’er and that’s all I need to know.”

There was more, but all I can recall really is the conversation that began in my own head where I asked myself: How have we come to this point in time where people are not only judging and writing off others they have never met, but are rating other humans’ worthiness on the planet based on one manufactured marker.

But then, this isn’t the first time, is it? We have done it again and again. It’s why school children study history, isn’t it? An opportunity to study our “greatest” moments of nauseating, devastating division and conflict… lest we forget. What we forget, however, is that those chapters in the story of human-(un)kind, wherever they have played out in the world, are always stories of a time in which we - swept up in group think and propagated terror - have sunk to our deepest lows of amnesia. A forgetting of who we truly are… Souls who simply want to love and be loved.

And here we are again on the political loop de loop, and people are screaming, and stomping their feet expecting others to give them what they want. It looks like chaos, but the reality is that all of that is nothing more than a purge of toxic values that our earth cannot stomach.

As a mother who has observed her fair share of tantrums and sat them out (and also thrown a few myself), I know one thing to be unequivocally true: A tantrum, at any age, comes from a place of feeling disempowered. It’s a cry to establish some sort of control over one’s world. The object or subject fuelling the tantrum is really just the trigger.

Right now, many people are trying to establish control over a paradigm that cannot sustain itself. Not because the paradigm was the best thing for them, or anyone else, but because they are so attached to it, like a toddler with their favourite sippy cup or “security” blanket. What they will, at some point, come to see is that the only thing you ever really get to have control over, is yourself, your humanity. And when we can do that, controlling others or other things, becomes not only non-sensical, but undesirable.

As I wrote this, I realised that friends may be lost as a result of my analysis. I have sat with that, and my feeling is this: If anyone I know is willing to sacrifice my friendship, others, or valuable employees because they bow to the political threat du jour, then the friendship was already questionable.

Never sacrifice those who stand for your sovereignty. They are the ones who see your divinity beneath all the layers of your humanness. Whether you see it or not.

They are the doctors and nurses walking away from jobs right now because they know that an industry that does not honour informed consent for its own staff will not uphold that for its patients. Perhaps it never did. (I touched on this in a post I wrote a few years ago).

The teachers walking away from work they loved are not doing it because they don’t care about the children or their jobs. It’s because they do, and they know that an educational institution that is prepared to force anything on its staff is an institution that will - when push comes to shove - not protect the children within its walls.

The workers who are giving up their livelihoods right now to stand for choice are not doing this lightheartedly. They are doing it not just for themselves. They are standing up for a future where humans are not simply regarded as commodities in the playbook that money makes the world go round. Because it’s not money. It’s energy and spirit. Theirs. Yours. And mine.

*Word changed for obvious reasons.