Reality

Things that you have to feel, that’s what you define as real.

The time you were beaten up for being poor, or Black, or Protestant, or Catholic, that's real, because that’s what happened.

The time that something like that happened to a parent or friend, that’s real also. You can hear the story and see the pain and understand how it was one of the things made that person who they are today.  You can even understand, a bit, the pain of a grandparent you never knew, by seeing it refracted down the years and shining, distorted and dark, out of the parent in front of you, a face you care about.

But those other people. Can the world be full of the same pain in everyone? Surely it is not big enough to hold all that. The woman who has to choose which child to try to keep alive with her scant, famine breast milk, can you care about her? Can you care about the baby who has to die to keep the little child alive for a short while longer?

We can’t care deeply, of course, about every injustice and hurt in the world. No one has that capacity.

We don’t have to feel that injustice and hurt. If we don’t read about it — which we don’t have to — and don’t think about it, we don’t have to feel it.

The rape victim does not have the luxury of not feeling about what has happened to them.  Neither does the soldier or the refugee. To them, their experience carries the weight of a reality that can’t be refuted. They were there. It happened.

When people use the phase “lived experience,” it is all too easy for us to dismiss them as coming from a narrow view of the world where only what happens to them matters.  Look at the big picture, we exhort.

The big picture is a mosaic of all the lives that make up the world. Every one of those lives came to be in its place through a hugely complex series of events.  Even now, the pieces are shifting and falling away and coming into existence. They are changing colours and changing shapes and breaking apart and joining with other pieces.

Some people try to force the development of the mosaic, by building barriers or moving certain types of pieces. They try small things in limited areas, or try to take over the whole picture.  They try to eliminate all the pieces of a certain shape or colour by force.  They try and take over the “big picture” to make it be what they think it should be.  Sometimes their efforts leave damage that takes generations to heal.