Gratitude vs. Action

This has been a challenging week, to say the least. One friend with breast cancer, one with thyroid cancer, one who recently had a miscarriage, and one that was in Haiti when the earthquake hit. While I spent the better part of three weeks taking care of a very sick baby, I am accutely aware of how good I have it.

I recently had a meeting with my fellow history teachers at work, in which I had to fight to convince colleagues who are more experienced and have more power than I that we shouldn't skip the chapters on Africa and Asia because that's ethnocentric and, though I didn't say the word, racist. I'm fighting to give my sheltered and privileged English students the chance to read books read by people who aren't white, sheltered, and privileged, and I'm fighting to give my history students the chance to learn about cultures that do not touch the Mediterranean Sea. That's wrong. I shouldn't have to do that. And I shouldn't have to work so hard to convince family and friends that all uninsured people aren't illegal aliens, that the term "illegal aliens" is unbelievably offensive and racist, and that just because I live in a city that is inhabited primarily by Mexican Americans does not mean that I'm unsafe. That blaming a group of people that are desperately trying to escape a life of poverty and suffering so that their kids can know a better world exists for having to wait for an hour in a hospital waiting room is racist. That blaming that same group of people for stealing their jobs and freeloading off their hard-earned tax dollars is ludicrous and quite racist. Unless you grew up dreaming of being a migrant fruit picker, a day laboror standing on a street corner essentially begging for work, or a fast food cook, no one has stolen any job from you. As for the freeloading, where do you think your tithes and offerings and charitable donations go? Have you ever donated money or blood to the Red Cross? Do the people that the Red Cross serves ever pay you back? Are the refugees in the Sudan manipulatively trying to steal your tax dollars? Do the immigrant families that show up in the ER because they've got parisites in their brain from living in squallor deserve your tax dollars less than the politicians whose trust funds got them their jobs? And spare me the "they should just come here legally" speech. First of all, most do. And when you look into a room and assume that everyone with brown skin is here illegally, your filter is faulty. Second of all, the process to enter this country legally is long and grueling. And while I agree that they should come here legally, many can't, and I assure you that if the situation were reversed and YOU were living in a lean-to made of cardboard and scrap metal and your kids were hungry and diseased from crapping in the same bucket from which you drank, you would move illegally too. Are there dishonest people that come here and leech off the system? Yes. Are there blonde-haired blue-eyed natural born Americans who leech as well? Yes. ENOUGH. Believing that anyone with brown skin is beneath you and deserves to be treated with contempt and condesension is no better than the founders of this country enslaving an entire race of people predicated on the same premise. What is worse is that the same people who feel sorry for me for living in a city with so many people who "don't even speak English" (which is a load of crap anyway, because if I lived in a neighborhood of French people no one would have a problem with it) and who are trying to tell me I need to skip the Africans and the Chinese in history and English are the SAME people who are rallying to help the Haitians. I'm sorry, but that reaks of hypocricy. Especially coming from Christians. Why would God want us to rush to the aid of one people while denying the basic necessities of another? What ever happened to "whatever you do for the least of these you do for me"? You don't get to be all compassionate about one country and then turn around and hate your literal neighbor.

Sorry for the piss and vinegar...I've just really been upset by the blaring incongruities and hypocracies that seem so blatant to me but are apparently invisible to everyone else.

So I'm stuck in this conundrum. My heart has been breaking all week for the suffering I see around me. From the student who walked in on his dad having an affair to my friend whose son is stuck in an interminable adoption process in Haiti, my heart aches. And I have this feeling that I can only describe as something akin to survivors guilt. I live a rich, blessed life. Right now I'm sitting on a comfortable couch under a soft blanket typing on a laptop. My son is sleeping (somewhat) soundly in his crib. The rain is pouring outside and the wind is ripping trees apart. This moment seems to really capture what I feel is my life--I'm sitting here in comfort and ease while the world is being torn apart around me. So all week I've been feeling the weight of the world, so to speak. I've been hurting for my sick friends, my unloved students, and the people of Haiti. In the comfort of my middle class American life. I just read an incredible book called The Elegance of the Hedgehog, in which a lower-class concierge expresses disgust for a wealthy resident of her building running around in ragged clothes. The concierge character was angry because this woman dressed poor like it was fashionable, in a strange way showing contempt for her own wealth while amassing it and wasting it all the same while there were real poor people who didn't have a choice but to wear the rags. I'm not explaining it well, but I think the idea behind it was if you have it, use it. I am not wealthy by American standards, certainly not by Orange County standards. But by world standards I am. So how do I reconcile this with my bleeding heart? How do I live in gratitute for the blessings that I have, not living in poverty when I don't have to, but still acting upon that bleeding heart? I feel like if I were to continue to feel what is essentially guilty for being blessed then I am throwing God's gifts in his face. My heart hurts, but I feel like moping around and saying "woe is the world" is the wrong approach. Crying all day is not going to feed the homeless. But I feel like rolling around in my blessed life and trying to not let cancer, miscarriage, and poverty bother me is also wrong. So where's the medium? How do I live in gratitude and joy but also in awareness of the suffering of God's children around me? So I'm trying to find that medium. I'm caring for my friends with cancer, supplying meals, help, and child care. I'm donating money and calling senators for my friend who's son is stuck in Hell. I'm praying like mad. And somehow in the midst of it I'm trying to play with my healthy little boy, trying to enjoy this little piece of free time (today is a holiday). I feel like this isn't enough. But again, spending my life stripping myself of God's gifts because I feel guilty that I'm the one who gets to live in comfort while others are sleeping in the streets is probably not what God wants, and again, it doesn't help anyone. So how do I do this?

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. He stood up for what was right. It's time that we do too.