“I always felt that my fate was to heal people. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. But there’s so many sick people. Every day more come, they have cancer, they are dying…it’s like a war and I’m just a nurse in the middle of a battlefield. You can break something in two seconds, but it can take forever to fix it…A lifetime. Generations. That is why we must be careful on this earth.”
These words come from a movie released this year (2017) called Beatriz at Dinner. Ironically, one of my best friends whose name is also Beatriz is the one who recommended I watch this film.
It occurs to me that this article could easily become a film review. That is not what this article is. Ultimately, this article is about how the words of this fictional character—played by Selma Hayek—are true in so many ways.
Ultimately, this article is about the hundreds of thousands of people fighting a losing battle against foes such as environmental degradation, police brutality, racism, gender inequality, FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), political corruption, and most of all people not believing that any of these things are actually an issue to begin with.
I sit here behind my keyboard in Campus Grounds typing an article on this subject because of a couple of conversations I have had over the course of this semester and over the course of my time at Wake Forest.
Those conversations have been held with different individuals, in different locations, and at dramatically different times—some of them happened at 2:00 AM—but these conversations were all with people who have been trying to push for change in some area or with people who see the need to push for change. None of them, however, were sure that trying to change things is even actually worth it in the end.
All of them—myself included—were faced with the constantly growing wave of issues in the world and the subsequent question of whether or not to exhaust themselves trying to make a difference or act like they do not see the issues piling up all around them. With every bit of knowledge, we gain we, myself and others, like Beatriz realize just “how fucked” the world really is.
With every class we take and every instance of indifference we face, be it from classmates, professors, co-workers, friends, or even family, we see just how entrenched the world—especially the United States—is in denial on the issues we will eventually reckon with.
This is fucking exhausting.
Looking around at the walk outs that we have on campus, at dinners dedicated to the word empathy, at conversations held on campus about the state of the Criminal Justice System, at a classroom full of people who ask you about “Black on Black crime” statistics when you try to explain that blacks are killed by police officers at three times the rate of their white peers—and no it isn’t because blacks are more prone to criminality but because the institutional and often unintentional biases of our society paint people like me as criminals and we all fall for it at times—is exhausting. Looking around in a classroom when you posit the concept that the very society we live in is destroying generations of families because of its foundation in stratification, and at a family dinner when your family members spout language that does nothing but reinforce the very social stigmas and social shackles you are desperately trying to break, is exhausting. Thinking about everything we, as a world, face is exhausting. But we have to do it.We have to continue speaking out about the injustices we see. We have to continue being one of two or three individuals who speak passionately in classes of thirty when issues of inequality crop up. We have to be the individuals who are constantly ready to have the conversation when no one else wants to have it. We have to, because if we don’t, no one else will. If we don’t, we are just as culpable as all the people who shoot unarmed civilians, burn down forests, or push an individual into isolation because they are different. Ultimately, in the words of Eldridge Cleaver “You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem,” so to avoid being part of the problem, we are part of the solution. But we can’t do it by ourselves.We need help. We need to be able to step back and collect ourselves for a time so we can jump back in head first later. Sure, we can rely on other activists and likeminded individuals, but that pool, especially on college campuses, is distressingly small. It needs to grow, and I have no real idea how to make that happen. One thing I know we can do, however, is work with incoming students to grow that community of people who care. We can reach out and bring them into the fold, and all of us can continue to support each other over time. We can also try to explain why we need help to people who do not understand instead of screaming at them for not understanding. But that’s an article for another time.
