Bottom Lines and the Whole Cloth
It was a very quiet day on the bay. There wasn’t much sound except for seabirds and the drip from my paddle. I floated over crabs skittering out of my shadow. Looking up and out, I could almost see the horizon drop down with the curve of the earth.
A few times a year I get to take my little canoe onto Cape Cod bay in the early morning. I cherish the feeling of being on the water, and the distance from the to-dos of my every day. Usually, steering the canoe keeps my mind just engaged enough to rest.
Not today. Today I was filled with something close to desperation; the news of the world – the news of my own country was that disturbing. I couldn’t not see the suffering, the tragic, misguided, cynical unfairness of it all.
When grief and struggle make no sense to me, I conjure conversations. I imagine questions I’d ask the people making decisions, enacting the orders, causing the terrible harms. I fantasize about convincing them to stop. I gather armfuls of reason, facts and stories to hand to people in my own life who aren’t troubled by the suffering, or worse, who support, even celebrate what looks to me like cruelty beyond comprehension.
Well that’s not quite true; I understand its roots: terrible bigotries, generations of trauma, human fears and honest misreadings of complicated truths. Those last – the fearful, the honestly not-knowing: those are the people I imagined talking with today, alone on the bay in my little canoe.
And I knew those talks I imagined would likely do nothing to get to where I wanted things to go.
The grip of some beliefs is linked, in the minds and bodies of believers, to their survival – to the wellbeing of their children. Views of the world thread through culture and tribe. Culture and tribe can feel like oxygen; without it there is no life. Few arguments, not even pleadings with people who love me, can breach that wall.
But I’m wired (for good and for ill, believe me) to look for solutions to problems that cause human suffering. That usually starts with a question. In this case: how can we stop the suffering without insisting they change their worldviews?
Years ago I asked a woman I knew, an activist, organizer and teacher, how she managed to drive change in the midst of suffering rooted in fear and genuine views of the world. Her answer was quick: know your bottom line and keep your focus there. As compelling as they are, she said, leave aside all else.
So what is my bottom line? For a long time, I would have said social justice. But those words have lost specific enough meaning for me, and for some people imply mindsets and beliefs I don’t share. There’s too much room for misunderstanding there, and too much need to clarify.
My bottom line is dignity and thriving. In bound systems like organizations, schools, and purposeful groups that means the capability to contribute and participate as who someone understands themself to be, without barriers based on who they are or are becoming. In the world it means being met and treated as a whole, complicated human – not only defined by one aspect of who someone is.
Among other things that means, as activist, thinker, and teacher Loretta Ross has said, I have to take others’ fear seriously, even if other aspects of how they move through the world disturb me. It means I need to hold the idea of social identity loosely. Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, warns against a tendency to “flatten” identity, dismissing complications at the expense of dignity. It means seeing value in complexity – human and otherwise.
I can be tempted away from my bottom line, drop onto the slippery slope of reducing people to less than they are. Or I can sidestep into bottom lines I believe in, like dismantling unjust structures of power, organizing against war, fighting for democratic process, strengthening education.
For any instance or pattern of cruelty or injustice, there are many courses of action, many choices to make. It’s useless to try to do more than my own bottom line, which is rooted of course in who I am – my talents and skills and beliefs, my vulnerabilities, my culture and past and, like everyone else, my view of the world.
I’m reminded of educator Ursula Wolfe-Rocca’s often-quoted social media post, “It can be overwhelming to witness/experience/take in all the injustices of the moment; the good news is that they're all connected. So if your little corner of work involves pulling at one of the threads, you're helping to unravel the whole damn cloth.”
Out on the bay this morning, I got lost in that overwhelm. I stopped seeing the stunning complexity of the ocean floor, and the mystery of the horizon. In my fantasies of convincing and insisting, I got distracted from my bottom line: respect for others’ dignity means I have to find another way. That’s my little corner of the work. I keep at it in hopes that it will help unravel the whole damn cloth.
Lucinda J. Garthwaite
Founding Executive Director
References
Loretta Ross quote is from an interview in The Persuaders, by Anand Geridharadas. 2023. Vintage Press. Learn about Lorretta Ross here.
Building Resilient Organizations. Maurice Mitchell. In The Forge. 9.29.2022