This Week's Opening Thought: October 7, 2024

This week's opening thought: Western culture loves talking about individualism until individualism means you as an individual have to own your contribution to an oppressive or harmful state of being. Then it's suddenly, "Well, this is a collective issue," or we're now "all in this together" when five minutes ago you were talkin' about how that one person over there needs to take responsibility for their actions or communicate differently.

Individual actions can and do impact collective survival and societal progress.

The harm you do as an individual harms the young people in your life who see you talk and behave in harmful ways, as they are now going to be carrying your unprocessed trauma and horrible actions in their brains and bodies.

The harm you do as an individual in a community or workplace amplifies the systemic oppressions of those spaces, harming the collective action of learning, unlearning, and growth needed for the collective to thrive and survive.

Being an individual in a society should come with an understanding of how easily individual decisions and actions can suppress, oppress, and damage the collective in micro and macro ways. The politics of Western society, especially over the last decade if you don't want to peer back even further, should clearly show you this, but Western culture wants us to think otherwise.

Being an individual in a collective means owning what you do and how you impact others in ways that help or harm collective progress. That means owning yourself before you go around trying to own others. It also means calling in or out others with humanity, even those individuals who have harmed others.

Be an individual who understands how they contribute or detract from the collective, not a collective of individuals.

There is a difference - and it ain't a subtle one.