Whose Imagination Are We Living In?
Photo by Austin Queen Portraits
Excerpt from Keynote Address at Creating Healthy Communities 2022 Co
“We are living in the greatest revolution in history – a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race: not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race, or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody. This is not something we have chosen; nor is it something we are free to avoid. This revolution is a profound spiritual crisis of the whole world, manifested largely in desperation, cynicism, violence, conflict, self-contradiction, ambivalence, fear and hope, doubt and belief, creation and destructiveness, progress and regression, obsessive attachments to images, idols, slogans, programs that only dull the general anguish for a moment until it bursts out everywhere in a still more acute and terrifying form. We do not know if we are building a fabulously wonderful world or destroying all that we have ever had, all that we have achieved! All the inner force of man is boiling and bursting out, the good together with the evil, the good poisoned by evil and fighting it, the evil pretending to be good and revealing itself in the most dreadful crimes, justified and rationalized by the purest and most innocent intentions. Man is all ready to become a god, and instead he appears at time to be a zombie.” – Thomas Merton
You see now is not the time for us to slip into slumber. Now is not the time for us to go back. If you want to take the island you must burn the boats. There is no going back to life before 2020.
I had a lot of time to think during covid. We are always talking about reimagining. But as I thought about this word more, I want to politely suggest that we haven’t even begun to imagine, let alone reimagine something.
One of the greatest questions I have been forced to ask myself during this time, “Is whose Imagination are we living in?” Who created this? Almost everything around us, everything we have come to know, has been constructed from someone’s imagination. And if we are being honest with ourselves the imagination we are living in as a cis heterosexual White man’s imagination. This is what they have conjured up. This is their game and I have played this game long enough. Haven’t we played this game long enough?
This is not my imagination. This is not what I would have created. I no longer want to play this game. I want to play another game. I want to play something new. When do we get a chance to play another game not designed by White men? I’m tired of this game. I don’t want to play this game anymore.
What if we could create a new reality.
A new world where people no longer hungered.
Where people didn’t die because they didn’t have access to healthcare.
A world where we understand that most houseless people didn’t grow up with the goal of pitching a tent underneath a highway overpass.
What if we imagined a world where kids are raised in communities where they thrive, a world where our zip codes do not determine our life expectancy.
Where quality education isn’t a luxury but the standard.
Where justice is for all and not just some.
In my imagination, we are living in a space where our differences are celebrated, everyone’s opinions and thoughts are valued, and everyone has a seat at the table. In my imagination Black lives matter so much that Black people don’t have to point out that our lives matter too. What if we lived in a world where people could just go to the bathroom without the signs? In my imagination women can make choices about their bodies without government oversight.
In my imagination expecting Black mothers don’t have to wonder if giving birth is going to be a death sentence.
In my imagination everyone from Jackson, Mississippi to the hills of Appalachia has clean water.
In my imagination we understand that every life has value because we understand how interconnected we are.
As Dr. King said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
What could we imagine
If we chose not to be afraid
If we dared to be believe
If we decided to take a different route
If we decided to build bridges and not walls
If we decided that people deserve second chances
That our past does not determine our future
What could we imagine?
If we chose to see the humanity in our brothers and sisters
If we made a decision to walk in love and not hate
If we chose to ask ourselves the hard questions and not be fearful of the answers
If we chose to stand together
If we admit, that in the past we have gotten it wrong and now we want to make it right
If we sat down and actually talked to each other
If we did away with our invisible masks and embraced everyone showing up fully as themselves
What would this world look like if today we recognized that we have the power to create the world we want to live in?
When you leave this space, you are going to run into those people that are going to tell you, the problems are too big. It is impossible. But Theo, Josh, Andre Guess and I come from a place called Louisville, KY where one of the GREATEST ATHLETES OF ALL TIME was born and raised. Some people in Louisville called him Cassius, you might know him as Muhammad Ali. And Ali said, “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
Absolutely NOTHING we desire to create is impossible. We decide how we want to leave this world. We get to choose if we want to leave this world better, richer, and fuller.
As Franz Kafka said, “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” This world is not yet what it can be because we as a whole have not desired it enough. So when you leave here, desire it enough that you are willing to do whatever it takes to make the change.
Whose permission are you waiting on to change the world? What sign are you waiting on to know now is the time.
We have an obligation to simply try. We have an obligation to try to create the world we want to live in.
Every day we get a chance to decide what we want to create, who we want to be, and the legacy we will leave behind. It is not tomorrow. It is now. It is today.
As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..."
Let us not be the generation where it will be said, WE WERE TOO LATE! Now is the time for change.