I heard a commercial on the radio this morning for a diet pill--the typical promises about weight loss and speed and all that--and then an additional promise: you don't have to exercise or change your life in any way!
Now, this is not a post about weight loss. Weight loss is hard, and as studies are showing there are very complicated biological factors that make it so. This is a post about the general idea that our society promotes that we can have any kind of change...without changing at all. Without giving something up, or adding something in, or having to have our nice little lifestyle altered at all.
And that's just not true. It might be true for this diet pill, I don't know, but it's not true for environmental sustainability, and it's not true for ending racism and addressing white privilege, and it's not true for evening out income inequality. Those of us in privilege will have to give something up, and all of us will have to change.
Part of a religious community's task, I think, is to help people see that there are choices to be made, and to support their own wisdom and strength in making the right choices. How can we hold each other accountable for what we'll have to change, or give up, to create the world we're hoping for? What do you think you need to give up or change or add on to see that world emerge?
1 comment:
>>How can we hold each other accountable for what we'll have to change, or give up, to create the world we're hoping for?
Ooo--a VERY tricky question, that one. I'm tempted to say we can't do more than hold people accountable for what THEY have said they will do. Otherwise, aren't we setting ourselves up as ethics police? I'm sure there would be lots of cases where you and I and many of our friends would agree that someone's choices were inhibiting needed social change--but trying to override his or her own judgment seems like a step too far.
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