Crash

Katie D.

November 15, 2009 - 2:39 AM

It's the middle of the night and I am wide awake.

It was a good Saturday night, with friends over to watch movies and hang out. It's been a good weekend: a mix of getting work done and relaxing, which is all you can ask for at this point in the term.

But after my friends left I decided to watch a movie in bed to burn a little extra energy. I raided my roommate's movie collection and came across the movie Crash, which I've been meaning to see for ages but hadn't gotten around to it.

This is the most amazing movie I have seen in a long, long time. I feel this inexplicable combination of hope and utmost pain, this reinforced understanding of how divided our world is, and how much damage people do to each other. The movie made me want to jump out of bed and start working: creating art, visiting people who need visiting, healing relationships and somehow moving my little corner of the world into a less-dark place.

Now, to clarify, my place in the world is an inconceivably bright one. I have such beauty and kindness in my day-to-day existence. But there is always more: more I see and more I pass by.

Crash is about race relations in LA. It's about privilege and violence and abuse of power and the hopeless convergence of coincidence and bad feeling can turn into meanness, violence, and a hatred deep enough to tear apart families and communities. It's about institutional racism, good intentions gone astray, and how good people can do bad things and vice versa.

Not a good bedtime movie.

I have been seriously committed to studying and acting for social change for the last five years. I came into social awareness at the end of my junior year of high school, based partially on personal experience, partially on a religious shift in my life, and partially because I was growing up. But this is the painful reality I came to understand: that my peaceful suburban experience was not deserved, was not a gift, was not something to be proud of. It was an astronomically unlikely privilege that I was born into the family and neighborhood and class and country and ethnicity that I was. I was born without physical disability. I was raised in a loving family. I was cared for by a vast social network of stable and kind adults and children. I went to fabulous schools. I have never been suspected of any crime or accused of wrongdoing of any kind, whether or not I deserved it. I have traveled widely based on the opportunities afforded me by my race and class, and those social positions allowed me to travel safely and with confidence.

I could go on and on and on. The subjects of the intricacies of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion (...) are enough to fill hundreds of books and classrooms and social movements. But here is the point:

Everyone arrives in the world with certain characteristics demarcated by biology, and others by sociology. And each of us shapes a small portion of the world as best we can.

Further point: my unique positioning means I can affect great change in the world.

As I was watching Crash, I was thinking about my work with Volunteers in Medicine. I was thinking of people without health care, and all the millions of intersecting reasons for a person to arrive in that situation. I was thinking of my work with No More Deaths, and the things I witnessed on the border, the stories I heard and the statistics I have memorized. I was thinking about Inside-Out and the prison population: of communication and collaboration, of ending the mystery and fear of prisons, and about how hundreds of other students (both inside and outside) have experienced the same form of transformative education that I did through that program.

I thought about my daily life, about who my friends are, what my plans are, and the hundreds of small interactions that constitute a life. I'm still thinking. What does my life mean to the world? I am my carbon footprint. I am my volunteer work. I am my friendships and my family relationships. That means I am the number of times I call my grandparents and the way I spend my winter vacation. I am my writing, my poetry, my thesis, my internship, my Saturday nights with friends, the gifts I make and the organic produce I buy.

I am also arriving at the end of my extended/privileged/modern American childhood, in which I was expected only to learn to live a loving life, to study hard, and to follow my dreams. Now I am arriving at a privileged/modern American adulthood, which means finally arriving at decisions I have been delaying all these twenty-one years.

Who will I be?

What I know for sure is that inaction is not an option for me. Inaction on any issue is in fact a vote for the status quo. And that status quo is so broken.

I don't know what to do with the inspiration that just arrived. At 3:00 in the morning on a Sunday, it's a little hard to go forth and change the world. But I'm writing, and that is something. This is a hopeful gesture: a way to remind myself again and again that I have purpose in life which I have to strive to deepen and expand. I am on the cusp of a new era of my life, one moving more and more profoundly into a realm of service to others. I want to run off this very moment: take to the streets, to the migrant trails, to rallies and soup kitchens and legislators' offices. There is so much to do! So much to be done!

Each stepI take matters. My choice of movie tonight obviously matters. Getting out of bed to turn down my heat and lower my electric consumption matters. The calls I'll make tomorrow and research I'll read and poems I'll write all matter. All of it.

The trick is to never forget. I might not be able to live every moment as aware and as inspired as I am right now. But the trick is to recognize the brokenness of a system, and live in as healing a way as possible, moving from one hurt to another until we somehow arrive at something better. Together.

That's a task for tomorrow. A task for my life.

A task that began when each of us was born.