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When one only thinks of themselves, their particular family or culture, as the only entity of value, we have a kink in the link of the chain of power. Power is to be shared, not hoarded like nuts for a starving season or withheld from a specified segment to the society. Everyone desires personal safety and personal prosperity, but we are all connected on a personal and a political level. Our personal and political are tied together like laces on a shoe. We are all walking, talking and living on this planet as one people.
My story as a gay father and a black man in America makes me political by merely being who I am as a story or personality within the human society. It becomes personal when it erodes my ability to move freely within the society, disrupts my ability to make a living or be heard as a viable voice within my community and my country. No person or personality within the human story should be saddled with being the unworthy villain of the society, the outcast…the other.
I cannot separate who I am in order to exist as a human being in this world. When it questions my personal and financial worth my life becomes political because it hinders me from being able to continue with assurance about whether I will be able to pursue my American dream of a pursuit of happiness. It becomes very political when your personal is not acceptable to my surrounding community or within the larger arena of the American community.
As a child of the 1960’s cultural movement, I was an active participant attempting to claim a new place in the society and a chance to create a new society of equality. I learned to accept the politicalness of my personal liberation. I knew the reasons for the resistance of change being asked for by the younger generation of the United States.
As individual citizens of the American population, we wanted personal and political equality. A conversation of cultural survival is part of the human equation. I feel this conversation should not be isolated to only one culture of one segment of our society. A son should not be more important to the society than a daughter. A straight person should not have more clout than a gay or transgender person. One religion should not dominate over another. One person’s rights should not have more value than another. When that particular positioning occurs is when the personal becomes political.
We are all human beings within this conversion of emerging people. Special treatment of any grouping or culture within our society only breeds division and discontent. Tribalism historically has been a part of our human society as a part of cultural survival, but there comes a point we have to expand to seeing a larger sensibility of being a universal culture of human people.
The personality of a person in the society should echo or represent a working character within the novel of the human story and usually within a novel setting there is a sense of resolution occurring within the storyline.
The personal liberation we were asking for has now become an obsession of solely wanting personal gain, not for gaining power for all people, but only a conversation of elevating a particular tribal group as a means of gaining the power to only serve a few and not the whole larger universal human tribe. Our sense of having a conversation of how we can survive as a universal culture is being outweighed by a cultivated conversation of maintaining selective cultures within our universal societal culture as being more valuable. When one culture of survival is more important than another, we have a division of power and purpose.
There are multiple cultures of people within this United States of America, such as race, sex, sexual orientation, politically liberal or conservative, and there will no unity within our larger universal culture, if there is a struggle for power which would enslave another. When we are using words of identification such as “me” and “they” or “them” we lose our sense of being “we.” We lose our sense of operating in a state of “fair business.”
There is a fine line or a borderline we are crossing as a people when our conversation of political survival does not include all living people. In order for the survival of the entire human race to flourish, we must stop the act of discrimination and political greed. We have to discontinue the act of finding justification of singling out any targeted segments of our society. We will not thrive as people until we stop making the personal into being political. To be politically correct, all of our lives matter and we need to work out a solution to attain a thriving culture of equality. It is only then we can have true human abundance which is actually worth more than man-made money.
Fair business and equal access within our society only feed the wealth of the entire human population. Respect for all human life creates respect for all personalities within the human story and in turn a chance for real human abundance.
To use a garden metaphor, a rose is no more valuable than the sunflower or the orchid. Each flower has its own individual value and placement. We need to value our entire human garden of personality and political culture.
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Photo by Kayla Velasquez on Unsplash