One for all and all for One

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come here because your liberation is bound up in mine then lets work together.” Lilla Watson, an Australian Aboriginal Elder, coined this phrase in response to mission workers, asking them to own up to the perception that they are the saviors to the hopeless and the experts needed to fix the problem. Anytime, we reach out to help another there is the possibility of a power imbalance that can turn an act of compassion into one of oppression. Have you ever helped someone with good intentions but secretly judged them, not really considering that had you been born under slightly different circumstances this could have very easily been you?
I love this quote. It helps to remind me to take off my “white, privileged, from a middleclass upbringing, colored glasses” and see that people’s problems are more than just wrong choices but stem from exploitation and oppression than I have not known. Would the world be any different if we looked beyond the “drifter” with the smelly clothes begging for money, and instead saw a human being just like yourself who longs for belonging, love and compassion. How much kinder would we be to one another if we could see the many causes and events that influenced another’s life?

Are any of us really free? We are often unable to see the chains that bind and control us because we have eaten them for breakfast and served them for dinner. Oppression has many faces from racism, sexism, ableism, sizeism, ageism, classism, heterosexism, and speciesism to name a few. We all share in these oppressions through our actions or non actions. You can’t be for one and against the other. It’s the same manure, different pile.

I think we can also extend this sentiment to other life forms on our planet and not just human beings because entitlement is a delusion that we have spread thin. So many animals on our planet are tortured in the name of science, beauty or for food. The earth is so abused because we don’t connect to our environment enough to really protect it. Our human superiority has entitled us right out of a planet almost.

In the end, if we are bound to each others liberation, then we must also be tied to another’s oppression. It is therefore, always in our collective best interests to support those who challenge oppression in any of its many forms. It is the responsibility of each and every one of us to refuse to conspire in the ignorance of privilege. The only thing that we are all entitled too is the sharing of health, joy and abundance for all species on our planet. It’s for everyone. Lets send that out to the planet