"People As Things": 30 Days of Community

Like all people, I’ve been watching with pain and sadness as our world has gotten increasingly desperate over the last months. Like many people, I’ve been sitting in my house wondering what I can do to make it better. How can we get to a place where we can’t bear to see other human beings hurt? How can we get to a place where the value of a human life is more than any property? The late, great Terry Pratchett described the origin of sin as “thinking of people as things” and I’ve rolled those words around in my mind for hours and hours. People as things, people as things. How do we come back from that? Because I know I think of people as things far too often - obstacles between me and what I need, entertainment for a boring afternoon, robots who, when paid, should give me what I want without complaint.

It wasn’t until I started leaning into this whole community thing that I forced myself to see that all of the people around me are the protagonists in their own story. They aren’t side characters in my quest. I started recognizing faces, learning stories and eventually gaining the courage to be more than a bystander, but trying to actively make those lives easier where I could.

That’s why I wrote my book. But it’s also the passion of my life. I wanted to jump into a 30 day series on doing the internal work that prepares you (and me!) for advocacy, but I think that first, I need to do a 30-day series on community. Maybe you have a community that could use a little TLC in the face of pandemic, murder hornets, protests, and cannibalistic rodents. Maybe you don’t have one yet and are trying to figure out how to move from friends to framily (that’s a friend family for the uninitiated). Maybe you have a strong framily but want to make sure that all members of your community are seen and appreciated and you’re not even sure who you’re not seeing.

I hope these next 30 days will help.