onus

“He who has the most grace …”

Every once in a while, I actually settle into a peace about the trajectory I have set for myself: to return to Alaska, to work in medicine, to run dogs, to spend extended time in the wilderness, to carve a home out of the woods with a rambling garden and a small menagerie of chickens and goats and horses. Even in re-reading this blog – which now spans twelve years! – I find posts from a decade or more ago reinforcing these more recent experiences and declarations. They demonstrate over and over that this track is one that is able to interrupt, or at least shorten, the recurrent episodes of darkness. That in it I find a contentment and happiness that I haven’t yet found in any other context – it is this deep feeling of contentment, of homecoming, that struck me when I first came north and compelled me to dig in my heels to stay. The daily tasks born out of building this kind of life become the constant meditation, the necessary cycle of breath, that stops the steep spiral of hopelessness and despair I seem to fight against, to one degree or another, on a daily basis.

But as soon as I begin to believe my own surety, I come across something that gives me gut-wrenching pause: a recent article on refugee camps in Africa, marking the total population of the two largest now well over half a million people, the point that these are not even the millions of individuals recently displaced by the more popularly covered Syrian crisis, the brewing Yemeni civil war, Boko Haram, North Korea. Closer, there are the daily reminders that Philando Castile was murdered by police just a mile from our home, and that sharp racial disparities continue to be ignored and minimized, engendering perpetual generations of inequality and suffering at our own front door. The list is endless and overwhelming as I sit in my safe warm home with food on the table, clean water from the tap, a steady job to go to in the morning and reliable transportation to get there, no fear of being killed by a stray mortar or jittery cop in the mean time.

Long ago, newly arrived in Surabaya as a wide-eyed nine year old, I was introduced to the idea that “he who has the most grace, pays.” Operating in this framework, regardless of fault, the person most financially able to make restitution after an accident becomes the responsible party. I saw this play out over and over again through a decade of coming of age on Java, and it sunk in.

Through this were woven the edicts of early Christian indoctrination (despite adult attempts to keep study purely focused on the work of salvation):

“Seek justice, correct oppression …”

“… do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor …”

“… and do no wrong or violence to the resident alien …”

“… defend the rights of the poor and needy …”

“… love your neighbor as yourself …”

“… maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute … ”

“… is it not to divide your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless and poor into the house …”

“do not look to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

This echoed through the narratives I encountered the literature I was coming more and more to both love and escape into. Courtenay presented PeeKay, fighting for racial justice in South Africa, and Jesse’s plight to drive home the violent hypocrisy race-based laws in the early years of Australia. Anne Frank scribbling away in her hiding place, facing unjust persecution and death. Harper Lee’s Atticus and Scout. They all spoke to a responsibility, more, an imperative, to do better, to be a voice, to give back.

The idea that with great power (or privilege) comes great responsibility echoed down from the French revolution, to high school US history courses, to comic books consumed on the sly. It sank in deeply, quietly steering my studies towards sociology and anthropology, driving me to inner city internships and then jobs with homeless, disabled and mentally ill individuals after graduation.

The idea of an obligation to fight for social justice, the idea that a good and moral person with privilege owes it to the others inhabiting this earth to do this, is a foundational stone I cannot remove. Coming around to committing, then, to funnel my energies and resources to a trajectory which prioritizes my own peace and contentment first, throws me into turmoil every time.