If Not Now, When?

 “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”—Hillel

“To begin with oneself, but not to end with oneself; to start from oneself, but not to aim at oneself; to comprehend the self, but not to be preoccupied with oneself. . .”—Martin Buber

I’ve been thinking again, lately, about how Power works. About who holds it; about the experience of being oppressed; about the experience of being an oppressor—because like most of us, I’m both at once.  

As a kid, I was mercilessly queer-bated; over the decades since, I’ve had my life threatened more than once on the streets of a large city by homophobic teenagers; been drummed out of a congregation of devout, upstanding Lutherans while its pastor stood impotently to the side; listened most of my life to right-wing bigots drape their incitement to discrimination and violence in the veil of religious freedom; had the full advantages of the legal recognition of my primary relationships denied me. 

I’ve also enjoyed most of the privileges of being a white cisgendered male, sometimes without thinking much about it. I’ve caught myself—or been called on—making thoughtlessly sexist remarks. I’ve worn clothes made in sweatshops by people whose lives I’ve barely given any thought to at all. I’ve contributed to the needless suffering of countless animals by buying industrially produced meat. I’ve paid my taxes to governments that subsidize ecological rape and pillage and the continuing disenfranchisement of indigenous nations. And on and on.

I struggle to understand how these sides of who I am fit together. I struggle harder in a season when my own religious tradition calls for a process of self-examination—a season that causes me continued discomfort because of the baggage it carries with it. Far too much of Christian practice in Lent ends up being about punitive navel-gazing, about idealizing a purer version of the isolated self. That model of penitence has for centuries done vast damage to members of sexual minorities. I react to it at gut-level by defending my own innocence and pointing instead to what’s wrong with the world.

Francis Spufford suggests that instead of talking about original sin, we pay attention to "the human propensity to fuck things up." Now that I’m thinking about Power, I find myself thinking about how, often even without being aware,  I can thoughtlessly collude in its structures—the very structures that oppress me, and that I claim to oppose because they oppress others. 

And I start to understand differently how to look critically at my own life. The shift is like turning a kaleidoscope. The pieces are still all there. But I can see more easily that what’s wrong within me isn’t  so separate from what’s wrong in the world. If I long for a better world, helping to create it is tied up with building a better version of myself. Learning to say a louder “no” to the abuse of Power in the world means taking stock of the ways I say yes to it within myself.