Transcript:
I want to talk to the content creators and people who have pages like mine, people who know that we are in a position to influence how people think and perceive the world. A lot of us start the pages because we want to be able to influence how people think and how they perceive the world. I know I do. I have a lot of messages out there that I feel are very important. No change can happen if we're not even discussing it. So I start the conversations.
But I have an obligation as someone who puts myself out there to check my integrity, to make sure that I am worth listening to, that I model the behavior that I'm asking for. I don't have any right to sit there and ask people to treat people a certain way if I'm not doing it. If I feel strongly about something and I can't defend my point, and I can't express my point without harming someone else, without devolving into bigotry, without devolving into name calling, then I simply don't have that strong of an argument.
It's my obligation to ensure that although you can hold both emotion and logic when arguing or debating something, emotion is not in charge. It's not about how we feel about a situation so much as what we do about how we feel right now. A lot of us are in pain. The there is not anyone who follows pages like mine or who engages in activism and awareness that isn't suffering. There are very few people in the world that aren't suffering, especially in the United States. We have lack of health care. We have lack of basic resources. We are devolving into the worst parts of human history all at the same time.
We are all in pain. I'm in pain. I am an atheist, bisexual, disabled woman, veteran of color. Pretty much the only aspect that this government doesn't despise me on is my privilege in having been born cis. That's it. You know, I'm in pain, you're in pain. We're all in pain. But that doesn't mean that we get to spread, means we get to use it, okay? We use it. We use it for good. We use it for awareness.
We don't use it to start fights with each other because our fight is not with each other. And the more we fight with each other, the less we're fighting them. And that's what they fucking want. Why the shit would we give them what they want? You know, they want us reacting emotionally. They want us to just spout off. Because the more we just spout off and attack and in fighting, the less effective we're going to be.
I mean, look at the Republican Party, look at the Magas, and look at all of that. They have no real cause. They don't have anything, a single thing that unifies them other than hatred. They're not effective when it comes to their actual policies. The only reason they have any power in this world is because they stole, stole it. They stole it from me. They stole it from you. Why are we handing them more? Why are we going. I get that you're disempowering us by doing that. So let me just jump into it and just double fist this. Let me just swallow all of it. Why the fuck would we do their jobs for them? Not to mention the entire point is that we aren't them. We aren't like the people who only have hatred, who only have anger.
You know, and the other side of this is knowing when to speak, when it's your turn to speak and when it's time to sit back and let someone else. Because we are all in this together. And it doesn't matter how knowledgeable you are and how passionately you feel about it. Sometimes it's not your place to speak. Speak. You don't become an ally, you are honored with the title. And the most important part of being an ally is knowing when to speak and when not.
I just had a post where I was calling out people's behavior, but it would be irresponsible of me to put my opinion on the original topic because for one, I literally don't know enough about doesn't affect me. It never will, other than to know and understand better how to advocate for other people's rights, the rights that will, you know, eventually affect us. Because how one person is treated does have ripple effect. But at the end of the day, it's not my fight, so it's not my say. So for me to say anything in this scenario would be irresponsible on two levels. One, I'm not knowledgeable.
Remember I talked about integrity. Part of that integrity is ensuring that to the best of your ability, you know what the hell you're saying, that you are responsible and purposeful and intentional with what you put out there. And again, the other side of it is it wasn't my place. My opinion doesn't matter. It really doesn't. It doesn't matter if I agree with it or not. It's not up to me to agree. It's up to me to accept and adapt. You know, somebody else's lived experience is not for me to validate or define. It's for me to learn from. We are here to learn from each other. We are here to learn how to be better people. We are here to learn more effective ways to take down this fascist dystopian bullshit hell that we are living under.
But we can't do it if we aren't responsible, if we aren't intentional, if we aren't smart about this. You know, not to be ableist, but you know, because I'm not talking about actual intelligence, but I'm talking about the effectiveness of the decisions that we make in this. How do we speak to each other? You know, what do we do? What do we do when we're mad? You know, I have people that challenge me and they piss me off. Of course they do. But first off, the first thing I need to do when somebody challenges me on something is ask myself whether or not their challenge has any merit.
Now, there are a lot of nuances to this, you know, as to how I respond. Because just because someone challenges me and they're right, if they come at me in bad faith or disrespectfully, that's a whole other area. But I still have an obligation to ensure that what I put out there, like I said, whether it's in response to being challenged or something I put out there on my own or anytime I speak in a public form, whether I asked you to listen to me, I have to do so with integrity and I have to do so with intention.
Otherwise, I'm part of the problem. I don't want to be part of the problem.
Do you?
©️ Libby Rahl. May only be shared with proper credit
