We are all worthy of protection
There is always grief and trauma around us, at a local, national and global scale. Organizations often grapple with acknowledgements - what events should be acknowledged, and how can you possibly cover them all?
We’ve been talking about this at Co-Creating Inclusion as well, and have been considering the idea of a “grief acknowledgement.” We may not be able to acknowledge every single thing that is going on, but we can acknowledge that we are all likely struggling with varying degrees of grief and trauma, including secondary trauma, from the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene, to the brutal, ongoing war and attempted genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon, to the anniversary tomorrow of the Hamas attacks on Israel, to ongoing conflicts, human rights violations and war in various parts of the world including Darfur, Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, China and more.
Add to that election stress and uncertainty, erosion of rights here in the US, the ongoing impacts of climate change, continued state-sanctioned violence against Black and brown folks, economic uncertainty and… oh yeah, covid is still a thing, including long covid.
LaVoya and I recently travelled to facilitate a one-day retreat with one of our amazing Black women leaders, and a half day retreat with her mostly BIPOC and mostly female team.
As we moved through layers of inherited beliefs we landed on a powerful concept that can be surprisingly hard to grapple with:
We are all worthy of protection.
What we've found is that people have all kinds of reactions to this statement that you might not expect.
In fact, we got some pushback on it, from people questioning whether they themselves were worthy of protection, to the statement landing as an impossibility.
The reality is that what we experience on a daily basis is that we are not worthy of protection, some of us less than others - dominant culture and our systems are not designed that way.
How much of this have we accepted? How much of this have we internalized as somehow related to an inherent unworthiness on our part? We also see it manifest as entitlement - the belief that we are superior to at least some, and therefore more worthy of protection. Whether we are willing to admit that or not, I think that is kind of a universal human impulse also.
What would the world look like if we truly not just believed but acted as though we are all worthy of protection?
What would it look like if we rejected the notion that the safety of some must be at the expense of others?
What would it look like if we didn’t let the fear of scarcity create a reality of scarcity?
And what very small steps can we each take that are within our control to contribute to a ripple effect beyond our imaginations?
What would that look like?
Banner image by Karolina Grabowska for Unsplash+
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