I was thinking this morning about two different issues in my life right now, and both of them coalesced around: When you only see what is, not what was, you’re only seeing part of the picture.
Let’s start with Henry Ford, who is credited with creating the 40-hour work weeks. I’ve been seeing memes booing him, as if he made things worse. But he was decreasing the work expectations for his employees: He was giving them another day off, with pay. Why is that to be booed?
If you don’t know what Ford was replacing, then it may well look like he did a terrible thing. (And Ford did do plenty of terrible things, but shortening the standard corporate work week wasn’t one of them.)
Union membership at my workplace is lower than we’d like (although, honestly, anything below 100% is lower than we’d like). I think one of the reasons why certain people resist paying union dues is: What does it get them? I’ve worked in union and non-union shops, as a teacher, and the union gives me a lot. But: I would get almost all of the same benefits without the union.
So why should I pay when I can get the benefits for free?
My answer is: Because I don’t want the union to collapse. True, it’s not going to collapse if we’re not at 100%; it’s not going to collapse if we’re at our current level. But at some point, if we lose enough members, we will collapse, and I don’t want that to happen.
I’ve seen what was. I’m keeping that in mind, not just what is right now.
In the community where I work, there are a lot of immigrants, and a lot of Black folks. The immigrants hear the Black folks using the n-word to mean “friend” or “fellow” and think they can do the same thing. They don’t know the full history behind the word, they just make an observation about language usage and think they can join in.
They don’t see what was; they don’t know the back story. It’s not malice, it’s ignorance, but ignorance of the full context can be just as damaging as overt malice.
In that community, many of the immigrants are from the Middle East, where queer people are still beaten and even murdered by the government. So they come here and see the queer folks here, where we have many more rights, and think we’re just whining. We’re just flaunting things in their faces. Why do have to fly flags? Don’t we already have enough protection?
They don’t see what was, and we don’t see what was for them. This is a dual empathy issue, and those are difficult to overcome.
I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, but I wanted to get these thoughts down for… whatever reason.