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I’ve been grumpy for something like 2639268 days and didn’t want to put that energy out into the world, so I’ve been very limited in my own social media. But I do want to make sure to send love and love and MORE LOVE to all who need it (which I think is everyone).
And also...
And also...
I’ve been thinking nonstop about Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s stance that “where life is precious, life is precious.” What ties everything together for me is the need for us to fight, always, for life to be precious. No exceptions. No throwaway people. Ever.
Where life is precious, work is not more essential than workers. Property and profit are not more important than people. In a pandemic, where life is precious, we take care of each other and of the most vulnerable. Where life is precious, Black Lives always—and of course—matter.
Where life is precious, we worry about teachers getting COVID. And we worry about bus drivers, janitors, and food service workers getting COVID. We worry about undocumented people, disabled people, chronically ill people, doctors and nurses, and people in prison getting COVID.
Where life is precious we don’t confuse punishment for justice and we don’t respond to violence with more violence. Where life is precious we don’t shut off people’s water or build pipelines that threaten people’s water or poison people’s water with lead.
Because where life is NOT precious, it is NOT precious. What we allow to happen to even one person, we make permissible for anyone and everyone. Nobody is an exception to the rule that life is precious, so we have to fight for everyone just as we would fight for ourselves.
I don’t find Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s stance—that “where life is precious, life is precious”—naive, utopian, or untenable. To me, it’s a North Star.
I don’t know how we will move through the year(s) ahead. But what little energy I have, I am placing nearly completely in raising children up to understand that where life is precious, life is precious. Wherever learning is happening, I hope this is the lesson.
