I don’t know if you share this experience, but sometimes it seems like everything I’m reading, every conversation I have, points in the same direction, toward the same topic. As though the universe is saying, “Think about this, now. This is the thing to figure out this week.” Lately, that thing has been the topic of motivation. Namely, why in the world do you what you do? Where does your drive toward a thing, a topic, a social cause, a perspective, come from? How far back can you trace it? I’m taking a class about human trafficking as a contemporary moral issue right now, and over and over again we’re circling back to why it is that people feel the need to participate in social justice issues. The answer, “Because it’s just the right thing to do,” while perhaps easy, is less than helpful. Because, really, not all of us are interested in abolition of slavery. It’s just not on the radar. So why is it central for some, or why is another issue like abortion, or environmental degradation, or the death penalty? Why? I’m still thinking about the particular causes I’m concerned about, where my motivation comes from, my attraction to them, but I think I’ve figured out why it is that I’m generally worried and involved with issues when people are excluded, marginalized, silenced. Whether it’s poverty or lesbian and gay rights, I am overcome with some real anger and sadness that people aren’t cared for, that they aren’t heard.
Last month, I received a Facebook friend request from someone who was one of the popular girls in my elementary school, and it reminded me of where some of this comes from, for me. I was one of those awkward kids… I never really knew how to dress, didn’t have that natural social aptitude other kids seemed to just exude. A loner, a reader, the one who liked people but had no clue how to start a conversation with the cool kids. But, our elementary school was small, so we really had to hang out with everyone. Somehow, I got hooked into wanting to hang out with the pretty girls. Not a big surprise. They weren’t even very interesting or smart, but that’s the stupidity of being human, wanting to fit in. One day in the third grade, on the athletic field where we had daily recess after lunch, I wandered over to the spot where these five particularly popular girls hung out. They wouldn’t have invited me, hadn’t, but I had no reason to think I wasn’t welcome. But I walked up to the little clutch of them and said, “Hi, can I sit down?” hoping for someone to hang out with at recess. And one of them, the coolest (’cause she could do that thing with her bangs that was so popular in the mid-’80′s, where they fluff up 5 inches… you know the style. I couldn’t ever manage it without looking ridiculous), she looked right at me and said, “I’m sorry, do you all hear something? I could swear I heard something.” And turned to the others and smiled meanly. They sort of turned to me, then her, and one of them (the short, thin one, gymnast-type) said, “Nah. I think it was the wind. I didn’t hear anything.” And, as one, they all turned and ignored me, pointedly. I remember really clearly their nasty little exclusive smiles, the closing of the ranks. I’m sure this interaction took about 30 seconds. In my memory, it was an eternity. This isn’t a special experience – I’m nearly certain we’ve all felt this, in school at some point… at work, in our communities. Feeling erased, totally cast out, unwanted for no reason other than the fact that the other could do it, their social cache allowing them a moment of true power. We were eight… but it’s a microcosm, and representative of so many things I see in the world today. I’m a pretty privileged person, with most of the social and cultural advantages valued in our world today… I’m white, straight, middle-class, healthy, well-educated. And yet, even I could be silenced, devalued. I remember thinking, walking away in tears, that I never wanted to make anyone feel so small.
Then, at age 12, at my YMCA summer camp, I was those girls, for a summer, for the sake of feeling included, of being powerful. Mary was the only black girl at camp, and we made her life a living hell for one week, starting with the day one of her extensions fell out and we screamed in mock fear then shunned her for the rest of camp. I remember intentionally excluding her, the visceral sense of belonging because someone else didn’t. The rush, and the sort of satisfying guilt, of being capable of creating a space in which I was safe because for once I could draw boundaries around myself that didn’t include another person.
Thinking about these two very early experiences with exclusion, one as the target and another as the perpetrator, I realize I don’t do social justice work because “it’s the right thing to do.” I do it as penance. I do it because, out of that sense of personal responsibility, I can see the walls between people, ones I’ve built and ones that are being constructed by others, some of them tall and wide enough to blot out the sun, some small enough just to make sure people stumble. It’s not easy to admit that it’s not that I’m a “good person,” or kind, or particularly enlightened, that I feel the need to include people in the larger family of humanity. I’m not especially altruistic. Really, it’s all about me. Well, a lot about me. I need to do it, for myself, in order to be a part of that family, too, again. It’s selfish. And I think that’s probably not a terrible place to start. But it would be good to hear other people honestly own up to that motivation, too. Sure, I understand the how and the why of being concerned for others based on the words of the holy scripture I treasure and the person of Jesus who I attempt, falteringly, to follow, but my motivations, not my justifications for the actions themselves, come from long before I was a person of faith or a mature adult.
I wonder what motivations other people are willing to admit.
