Lessons in Knot-Tying

For the last week, I’ve felt tested in my patience and in my capacity for understanding.  Once again I find myself tangled in systems that have been designed to serve people who need help; who need assistance; who need a system to start working so that they, too, can start working.  These have become familiar feelings over the last five years, as I’ve fought, sometimes hand-in-hand, with angry parents and incongruous systems and frustrated and displaced people.  As I’ve tried to understand what it all means from where I sit in the world. To empathize, to grow, and to hopefully do something about the injustices I encounter.  But it’s never that simple: identify the problem, propose a solution, and enact it.  Step one, step two, and step three.  Because these tangled, mangled webs we call “systems” make such a mess of these "social issues" as they loop around these problems like string; wrapping and weaving until tight, unruly knots form and somewhere in the tangles both ends get lost.  Suddenly the problems no longer have beginnings and ends but soft, rounded edges that go on forever.

Sometimes I can’t name the things I feel.  I feel a series of words that live somewhere in between outrage and disbelief; sadness and embarrassment; fear and intimidation; courage and faith; idealism and hope.  They’re words that don’t always exist in the English language; words you can only feel in the way a child who is scared grips your hand or the way it feels when someone who is hungry looks you in the eyes.  These are words that get lost in human connections, because hunger has a hundred meanings and fear has a thousand sources.  Sometimes they’re things you can only feel.  And sometimes the words do exist but they’re ugly, nasty words like racial discrimination and educational inequality.  Ignorance and bigotry.  Domestic violence and substance abuse.  Racial profiling and gentrification.

And sometimes I feel downright strange feeling the way I feel, wondering if I really have the right to get so angry or to get so outraged about issues that aren't even mine to begin with, as I drive away in my car.  As I stir the pot of my dinner and contemplate what failed to happen today that could have done something for tomorrow.  As I sit inside my house, in my warm bed, and process my anger, my frustration and my disgust over people's ignorance and over middle-aged-white-men-and-their-corporations through this blog, on this laptop, with this wireless internet connection (knowing full and well that I come from a long-line of middle-aged white men, and probably am destined to marry one, too).

This is when I really start to beat myself up.  Perhaps I don’t suffer enough to ever understand the half of it.  These are the moments I remember the first time I got cussed out by a parent, got called a “white bitch”, and felt like I honestly deserved it.  The first time I honestly felt scared walking to my car at night.  The first time I witnessed police brutality, and I wasn’t the recipient.  These are the moments when I challenge my intentions the most:  Why AM I here?  What AM I doing?

Earlier this week, I went to hear Sister Helen Prejean, an anti-death penalty nun in the Roman Catholic Church, speak to a room full of Catholics, college-students and activists.  She’s a talented and powerful speaker.  After just twenty minutes of hearing her strong New Orleans' accent share stories about her book, Dead Man Walking, why she’s been called to God’s work, and why we all have to wake up to the injustice in the world, it becomes obvious why she’s such a good spiritual adviser to men on Death Row.  She's funny and smart AND a woman of God.  And while her talk mainly focused on the issue of the death penalty, speckled with some tragic and incredible stories about her interactions with death row inmates, she embedded an overall message into her platform about social justice that left everyone in the room changed, if not somewhat shaken.  She’s inspiring.  She makes it all seem okay.  Despite all she’s seen, and all she’s done, she still maintains hope for the future.

I always feel like there is no mistake made when these things all happen at once.  I'll refrain from the obvious serendipitous religious reference.  Here I am, having a horrible week, feeling all kinds of conflicting feelings about everything I’m doing.   I’m thinking I’ll take a quick break and just pop in to hear this nun tell a little story about the movie she inspired, and bam: I’m sitting there listening, letting all the anxieties and to-do lists of my life hang loose around my body, my over- caffeinated limbs practically twitching with exhaustion, and I’m having one of those god-damned light bulb “ah-hah” moments that I generally detest (can you say god-damned in a sentence about a nun?).  Her words hit me so far into my heart that I could hardly sleep.  I laid awake half the night thinking about all the things that were wrong with the world and consequently, all the things I wasn’t doing to fix any of it (okay, that’s a lie.  I do a lot, but sometimes it feels like nowhere near enough). 

Turns out, the world is kind of falling apart.  And turns out that I’ve decided to love a city that so many have written off as too violent and too dangerous.  Turns out I’ve decided to care about kids that so many have already decided have failed.  Turns out I’ve decided to continue to try to solve problems that so many have written off as unsolvable.  Turns out I’ve decided to turn in my brain and my worker-bee skills to be overworked and underpaid because I can’t seem to think about doing anything else for a living.

Part of the complexity of this whole thing is just how easily these problems can seem to disappear.  How seemingly invisible these communities can be and how comfortable people can be on the outside.  How unengaged.  How unaware people are of what exists just beyond their reach and how sometimes the people just beyond their reach are truly suffering; are truly hungry and living in a world that doesn’t even look like America, even if you got drunk and squinted.

How I have to make a conscious choice to see what I see, to dig where I dig, to engage.  And these feelings I get are embedded in this choice.  A knowing that I’m not always welcome where I go and that it takes time for people to trust me because I’m an outsider.  And I’ll always be outsider on some of these issues.  And how the issues can feel so huge.  All the -isms can feel so heavy.  And yet it all seems so simple: all humans should have access to all the things they need to be safe, to be successful, to be healthy and happy.

How sometimes working in urban education, I feel like I’m just trying to unravel the knot.  I’m playing that game where everyone holds a part of a massive piece of yarn and we’re told to roam around the room, winding and tangling ourselves (with the intention of unraveling ourselves later).  Except the room is a really, really big room, and the people holding the yarn didn't listen to the instructions, and without talking we’re supposed to figure out how to unravel ourselves from the massive human knot we've formed by bending around each other and non-verbally communicating and someone you don't trust has to crawl between your legs, while the yarn around your arm just gets tighter and tighter.  And every time we get one piece of the yarn untangled, a knot forms on the other side.

And there are days when I only wish I had scissors.  But something tells me, the Sister would advise me otherwise.