Tag: honesty

In Dangerous Times

One of the songs they sang last night was In Dangerous Times by Alison Burns.
90+ women lending and blending heart and mind and soul to make music.
And to give voice to hope.
What a gift.
In dangerous times hold fast to courage.
In dangerous times hold fast to love.

In dangerous times…
Maybe times like these
When lies are held up as truth.
And name calling and bullying has become normative.
And when it feels like the fabric of our democracy is being torn in pieces.
Me versus you.
Us versus them.
My street
My neighborhood
My town
My state
Versus yours.
I feel unsettled.
Very unsettled.
How about you?

I drove home from the concert thinking about the song I had heard.
And, adding my own verses to the ones which had been sung.
In dangerous times hold fast to compassion.
In dangerous times hold fast to truth.
In dangerous times hold fast to honesty.
In dangerous times hold fast to justice.
In dangerous times hold fast to integrity.
In dangerous times hold fast to courage.
In dangerous times hold fast to love.

I will try.

Everyone Does It

On the second Tuesday of most months a group of us gather in the back room of a local restaurant. We order our beer or our coffee or our glass of wine and spend an hour discussing the selected topic/question for the evening. This past Tuesday the topic was Lying.
Is it ever okay to lie?
White lies?
Half-truths?
Among friends?
In business?
To protect a life?
To avoid conflict?
It was an interesting hour.
And, like many conversations like that, I find myself thinking about them long after we have all gone home. One of the nuances we discussed was the difference between a personal morality and a more corporate one. We generally agreed we should not lie to our partner or family or close friends, but in the larger world fudging the truth to one degree or another is often a part of the cost and accepted practice of doing business.

Being who I am, I wonder what that disconnect does do our psyches and our souls.
I value one set of moral principles here.
Another there.
If I am a friend I have one set of expectations for how we will treat each other, but if I am nameless or a stranger anything goes. It allows for behavior in the communities in which we live which we would never condone in our families.

What, I wonder, does that do to our communities?
And, our life together?
And, who are to each other?

We Begin This Evening…

Tonight we will sit down together.
I don’t know how many of us it will be.
Ten or so around a table?
Twenty or so around a couple tables?
Maybe more.
Tonight we will sit down and begin a conversation about racism and prejudice as it is experienced in our communities and a part of our cultural fabric. In the deepest and most honest part of me I know it is a conversation we need to have.
A conversation I need to have.

As I have thought about our conversation this evening, I have to say I hope it makes me squirm in my seat. I hope it makes me stand face to face with a part of myself and a part of my community that, too often, gets politely gets swept under the rug. I hope I walk away…I hope all of us walk away…a bit unsettled and uneasy.

We are long past the point of polite conversations about racism and prejudice.
We don’t need to shout at each other or point fingers at each other or blame each other, but we do need to be honest with each other. And for those of us who are white, we need to step back from and acknowledge our position of privilege and to do our best to catch a glimpse of what the world looks like and feels like from the perspective of those who are not as privileged as we are.

Tonight we begin the conversation.
It is about time.

How are you? Fine. How are you?

How many time each day do you extend or hear a greeting that goes something like this:
How are you?
Fine.
And, yourself?
Fine.

This past week I was having lunch with a friend.
After a couple of months of not seeing each other we were catching up on how each of us was doing. Fairly early on, the conversation turned to how often each of us finds ourselves going from one demand to the next or one appointment to the next or one task to the next with little or no time taken to really pay attention to the person across from us let alone ourselves. Somewhere in the mix of our conversation that went back and forth across the table, in passing, my friend mentioned the exchange with which I started.
How are you? Fine. How are you? Fine.

As so often happens, I find myself in a serendipitous moment when something I see or hear each and every day suddenly strike me in an entirely new way. And so it was with our exchange over lunch. I know that most of time when people ask how I am they really don’t want to know. It is not that they are uncaring, but in that moment they are only practicing a social convention in which we all share. But I decided the next time someone asks me how I am doing, I am going to use that moment to check in with myself.
How am I doing?
Fine or not so fine?
Tired?
Stressed?
Grateful?
Content?
Maybe a 10 second check in with myself will help me to see where and how I am so I can be more honest with myself and pay more attention to the moment which I have. Naming how I am may not change how I feel or the situation in which I find myself, but it may help me be aware of the strengths or the vulnerabilities which I bring to any given moment. Anyway, I am going to give it a try and see what happens.

How are you…really?

Collateral Damage

I got home late last night, but just in time to see the opening couple of minutes of the new NBC’s news program Rock Center. With the Iraq War coming to an “end” after nine years, the program began by recounting the cost of the war. Cost-in terms of dollars, American lives lost, and the number of soldiers wounded. But not a word about the “collateral damage” caused by the war. Collateral damage in terms of the number of Iraqi citizens killed or wounded which estimates put, at least, in the tens of thousands if not more, and the amount of destruction done to Iraqi homes and businesses and infrastructure. Maybe something was said later in the program which I missed, but nothing was said in those first few minutes.

All that is very troubling to me for two reasons.
The first is that, as a nation, we have never been willing to really talk about the human cost of the war. We have been purposefully shielded from those images and that heartbreak in an effort to make the war more palatable to the American public. And, the second reason is that the very real human suffering, when it has been talked about, has always been referred to as collateral damage. Something like “Opps. My bad.” and never about children being killed or mothers losing a leg or a family’s home being destroyed.

Until we are honest…
And, until we demand a level of honesty from our elected officials about the true cost of war, war will continue to be far too easy.

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Several things I believe: