Waiting for hope to resurface

I sit at my desk waiting for hope to resurface from the morning deluge of tragedy in the news, and it is difficult–so very difficult–to find the belief that our humanity hasn’t all but been annihilated.
We blame Trump, or most of us do, with his narcissist madness. His politics most certainly gives permission for the madness in each of us to surface, but the madness was already there.
When we feel justified that our rights to freedom and our rights to a safe life, to a comfortable life, should come ahead of another’s rights for the same things, when we think we should be allowed to feed at the trough ahead of another based on our skin colour, our gender, our sexual affiliation, our religion, that is where madness is incubating.
So here I am in a community of 1,300 plus (at last census) in Dawson City, a community with a thriving creative voice in visual art, music, and literature. This is a community that recognizes our differences in sexual affiliation; a community that honours First Nations’ land rights and acts on that responsibility.
And a community that recently welcomed Khari Wendell McClelland, Freedom Singer, into a packed house in the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (KIAC) ballroom and listened to the stories that Khari gathered as he “traced his ancestors’ path to freedom through music.”
I was one of the many, in my seat enthralled from beginning to end with the magic that was Khari, as he respectfully honoured the life of his great-great-great-grandmother, Kizzy, and all who walked with her, before her and after, to freedom.
Those who acted on the belief that they were born worthy and quoting James Baldwin, an American writer and social critic, “Our crown has already been bought and paid for, all we have to do is wear it.”
I think it is small communities like Dawson City, and like Fort Frances, who will raise their collective voice in the name of humanity.
When we gather in cities, we lose our vision. We become a bit like packing dogs that get barking and chasing what they come to believe is prey, and we become impervious and blind to the acts that disregard the individual, that forgets the single child that goes hungry, and we think of refugees and indigenous peoples and the homeless as a “thing,” and we forget that people live inside that “thing.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, author, journalist, and national correspondent for The Atlantic, wrote: “Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own.
“Who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favourite cousin, a favourite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone.”
Any change that brings us closer to humanity and its inherent rights doesn’t come easily. It comes with sacrifice, with pain, with discomfort.
And it comes with a voice that others will try to silence.
wendistewart@live.ca