I am awake, I am alive, and this morning I cannot help but think … the house is burning and I don’t think you should call the Fire Department.
Imagine for a moment if you will, a house built for short people by short people. They are comfortable in that house – counters the right height, chairs comfortable, pictures hung at a height aesthetically appealing to them. Problem – there are many tall people that live in the community yet all the houses have been built by short contractors for short people.
Imagine those same contractors built all the town halls and the building where parliament sits resulting in those buildings being equally exclusive. Imagine only English can be spoken within the walls. Imagine only the opinion of men is valued there. Imagine a dress code made up of little, tiny suits even though they keep inviting tall and female and other language speakers to “join them”.
The house is on fire and I am pretty sure it should burn because institutions constructed by white men will always be comfortable only to the white men they want to subconsciously (or blatantly) support. A women never feels heard or valued or safe in those walls and neither does the indigenous who lived here before the house was built or the black whose ancestors were forced to this continent many, many decades ago, forced here by the short people who needed someone to build their houses for them.
And the same goes for policing, in my opinion, for I believe peace keepers should have but one goal – to protect the people – without ever forgetting that “the people” includes tall people in the form of the thief, the druggie, the newcomer, the student, the poor and the protester along with the peaceful and law-abidingly invisible. The people includes tall people and if you are not protecting them as well, then policing is failing.
And into the insanity that is this time, the GALL of insulting … a building. When people are arrested or condemned for speaking up against a system or institution because it fails them (or they just don’t like it) and somehow that makes them a problem … then the rules are the problem.
I sit here today shaking my head, as white after white come at me, writing on my wall, explaining their supposed lack of privilege, trying to explain to me how #BlackLivesMatter excludes too many people … and they don’t see how absolutely ironic that statement is, spoken by the short who have excluded the tall from day one. But truth be told, the short are growing restless and/or scared as they come to terms with the fact that they are no longer the “only ones” that matter because simply, they never were.
In my humble opinion, tables of leadership must represent the Medicine Wheel, as should any force tasked with maintaining peace in a group of people. If all the beautiful colours and cultures and ethnicities of the community are not represented in the governing and protective bodies … then the house needs to burn so that a new one can be built.
As a woman, as an Anishinaabekwe, as a tall person … do not tell me what a protest slogan should be and don’t tell me I am not allowed to voice my opinion. For if you do, you simply label yourself as a short person living in a house built on our land, designed to keep me out and I am sorry. I refuse to haul water to put that fire out.
The journey continues.
Personally, I love you … all of you, even when you don’t get it. I simply pray that very soon you do or at bare minimum, you quit opening your mouth or typing until you do. It wouldn’t hurt you to be silent for awhile. Gawd knows we have had to live in that state for far too long.
Just know that making room at the table doesn’t work. It never did. We are too damn tall for your little bitty chairs.
I love you. HUGSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS Sandi
