Inaction, Rhetoric, and Silence
On my other website where I blog about human rights issues and children rights' issues, I added an entry today after attending a vigil for a slain Ecuadorean man at a train station near my university. While it wasn't the train station that is on the border of our campus, it occurred in a town nearby. See my entry here. I'm glad I attended the vigil today because it reminded me that while I'm griping and trudging reluctantly through my classes, there is a bigger vision for why I am here: social injustice, social change, and social action. And I believe that these all lend themselves to a framework of human rights that should be very evident in the field of social welfare.
I guess I'm just not done blogging about my reflection of this incident and some of the remarks made at the vigil this evening. It makes me wonder that if people aren't really concerned about injustice and senseless acts like this happening in their backyard they sure aren't going to be concerned about what's happening half way around the world.
One of the professors in my department made some remarks that included a challenge to transform the culture of inaction, rhetoric, and silence that is so prevalent in our society today and which are seemingly culminating in such horrible acts like the innocent slaying of a man simply based on the color of his skin. And she used appropriate words as acts of terrorism and lynching. Who can we call terrorists really if there are teenagers being raised in our very neighborhoods creating the same kind of terror that is so decried by the same people in other discussions?
Someone once challenged me when I said that inaction and silence is the same as consenting to those acts we are being silent about and for which we fail to take any sort of action. In our silence and our inaction, we condone plenty of acts that are contrary to what we think are appropriate or "right". Of course there is always the question of power - and the power to really change things. But if we can't even dialogue with one person, or help formulate the basic principles of tolerance, of human value and human dignity in our children, we wouldn't really know what to do with any large scale power anyway....
As a result of all of this, I am once again challenged - challenged to look beyond my own situation and see what can be done in the place that I am, despite my lack of motivation for class assignments. I am reminded that there is a bigger picture to all of this. Thank goodness that it doesn't just end with my papers and my presentation!
I guess I'm just not done blogging about my reflection of this incident and some of the remarks made at the vigil this evening. It makes me wonder that if people aren't really concerned about injustice and senseless acts like this happening in their backyard they sure aren't going to be concerned about what's happening half way around the world.
One of the professors in my department made some remarks that included a challenge to transform the culture of inaction, rhetoric, and silence that is so prevalent in our society today and which are seemingly culminating in such horrible acts like the innocent slaying of a man simply based on the color of his skin. And she used appropriate words as acts of terrorism and lynching. Who can we call terrorists really if there are teenagers being raised in our very neighborhoods creating the same kind of terror that is so decried by the same people in other discussions?
Someone once challenged me when I said that inaction and silence is the same as consenting to those acts we are being silent about and for which we fail to take any sort of action. In our silence and our inaction, we condone plenty of acts that are contrary to what we think are appropriate or "right". Of course there is always the question of power - and the power to really change things. But if we can't even dialogue with one person, or help formulate the basic principles of tolerance, of human value and human dignity in our children, we wouldn't really know what to do with any large scale power anyway....
As a result of all of this, I am once again challenged - challenged to look beyond my own situation and see what can be done in the place that I am, despite my lack of motivation for class assignments. I am reminded that there is a bigger picture to all of this. Thank goodness that it doesn't just end with my papers and my presentation!
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