One of the things I am most proud about, that we do here at Make A Way Media, is teach people how to better communicate and live in peace. I believe peace is a language that must be taught to humans from a young age. Probably the most important component of the language is not anything containing words at all. It is the ability to practice empathy and active listening.
For the kid crowd, we talk about this a lot in the K Club– how to be a better human and how to better develop empathy. We all really should make much more of a concerted effort to listen more than we talk. But we are a nation of talkers who feel entitled to speak our minds. Social media has only made that belief stronger.
Contrary to popular opinion, we do not have to weigh in on every subject. Sometimes we can just listen and when the speaker is done, it is okay to absorb that message. Sit with it for a while. Take it in.
Most troubling to me is the ongoing division in the United States which seems to be widening. You are either Black or White. Right or wrong. Good or bad. And there is nothing in between. Yet we all know this is not how life, and people work. None of us are all one thing or another.
The national recognition of Juneteenth was a beautiful thing that should have united people. Who in America would not celebrate freedom, right? But as soon as the country became washed over with the meaning of Juneteenth, it took even less time than that to use it as another topic to divide us. Some adhered more strongly to the 4th of July and vowed to never celebrate Juneteenth, and some said from now on they would never celebrate the 4th of July again.
I don’t think this was the point. A day of freedom for anyone is a day of freedom for all of us. I get that all of us were not free on the 4th of July. I get it. I would have been one of them. But you can’t tell me that we cannot find a way to celebrate the end of slavery and the independence of the country we all live in now. Reading is a great tool in so many ways. Throughout all of history whenever people have been oppressed, reading and writing was one of the first things to be banned for those who were being oppressed. We should be celebrating freedom in all its forms whether it is the day that every human being was freed in this country or whether it was the day our country gained its independence. We are free. We can do so many of the things now we could not do just a few decades ago. We can read, write, vote, own property, invest and I am telling you if you are spending more time talking about conflict than reading about how to take advantage of every one of these rights you have missed the entire point of what it means to be free.
Reading unites us. Reading can help broaden our perspective. Reading helps us better understand one another, including all the layers of intention and empathy we should see in our fellow human beings. Reading offers us a type of freedom that cannot be bought or sold. It can only be oppressed. And that is because reading is powerful.
So, I’ll be celebrating freedom- wherever it shows up. In all its forms. I won’t choose one freedom celebration over the other or put one of them down because both of these days offer me a chance to celebrate the protections I receive as an American who loves her books.