Diversity is Not An Option, If We Humans Want to Survive
It's time to relax into our natural state again
We humans are masters of denying reality.
We pretend things we know are true are not. We ignore and/or stuff our feelings. We try to be things we are not. We refuse to acknowledge things that have happened, or that are happening, because part of us believes that if we do so, they’ll go away.
Doesn’t this remind you of that game kids play, before they know any better, where they cover their face/eyes and think that, since they can’t see anything else around them, no one can see them?
We adults should know better.
But yet, we keep this game up… in adult-ified form.
One of the most visible ways I see us doing that, recently, is in the ways we have been acting like diversity among us is an option — one we can choose or reject, one that is a matter of preference or ideology.
Yes, in recent years, things like diversity, equity, and inclusion have been treated like a trend that all the “cool kids” are adopting — particularly since the worldwide uprising in 2020, after a video-recorded murder by the Minneapolis Police Department, of a Black man pleading for his life, ricocheted around the globe.
We all knew, when we saw that video, that it was wrong.
People in France. People in India. People in Japan. People in Canada. People in Brazil. And certainly people right here in Minneapolis.
People all over the world, in every kind of culture, of every race/ethnicity, knew that it was wrong and, to try to do something to express that inner moral knowing, took to the streets to raise their voices.
And for a few blessed years, our widespread norms prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion. The funders funded it. The governments prioritized it. Individual organizations wrote policies and plans for it.
But here’s the thing.
When realities are functioning like a trend in our culture, they lose their meaning. They become almost nothing more than “buzz words” that people mouth, or write, without really understanding what they’re saying.
The fact that this has happened to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has made these things something that our current United States federal government finds very easy to dismiss.
After all, they are dismissing what they believe is a mere ideology. Or a trend. They are dismissing something that they think some people are forcing on them.
And that’s the irony, here.
Diversity is natural — the most natural state of things.
A lack of diversity must be forced.
And the movement to promote what we call “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a movement to get us back as close to our natural state as possible.
This movement is not an ideology that is being forced.
Rather, it is reconnecting all of us with our full humanity.
This is a movement that liberates us all.
Forcing is Fiction
The colonialism that is responsible for the founding of this country is about one of the strongest, most unnatural forces that has arisen on this planet.
Humans arrived at a new land. Their mindset was domination, acquisition, extraction. The people whose home was already there were labeled less-than-human — animals, really. So killing them, or simply over-powering them and displacing them from their home, was something that was easily justified.
But all of that is a lie.
Colonialism is forcing an untrue story.
Thus, colonialism is fiction.
Similarly, another one of the strongest and most unnatural forces responsible for founding this country was chattel slavery — the completely disordered, sick practice of some human beings owning other human beings as property.
Somehow, people actually convinced themselves — through a power-hungry, well-developed system advancing the supremacy of white skin (as though one’s skin has anything to do with one’s mind or heart or character) — that humans with dark skin were (hear the echoes of colonialism, here?!) essentially no more than animals. Thus, they could and should be owned by other humans, the ones that had convinced themselves they were superior.
Here again, chattel slavery is forcing a completely untrue story.
Thus, this is fiction too.
We humans do this kind of thing so much.
We have an outcome we want. We’ve determined that it’s “right.” So we invent stories — about ourselves, about others, about the world around us — that help us to force and justify the fiction we want to create.
Now, this reality can be complex. I can hear what you may be thinking.
Aren’t the kinds of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs we’ve been seeing in the past few years their own form of forcing a fiction?
You could believe that…
… if you didn’t acknowledge how false the stories were that powered this country’s founding and development, over many generations.
Knowing that an entire country was founded and grew from such powerfully false and destructive stories, you’d also know that there is a degree to which a dedicated, conscious counter-narrative has to be developed, and advanced, and implemented, as a balancing force to generations of powerful lies.
And if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll also acknowledge that that counter-balancing force has barely gotten started in our country.
The diseases of the original lies are still rotting our country’s flesh from the inside-out.
We will collectively perish from these diseases — the diseases of domination, of supremacy, of extraction, of acquisition, of greed, of individualism, and more — if we don’t actively seek out their antidotes.
And the only way we can seek and find the antidotes is if we acknowledge the diseases in the first place… and then resolve to heal from them.
We won’t survive, as a country — as a collection of human beings living in community with each other — if we continue to languish under these diseases.
Allowing is Actual
As our global human society moved through — and accepted the demands of — the Industrial Revolution, we lost significant parts of our humanity.
Suddenly, “human” creations were being fabricated apart from human hands. People started moving around the planet at speeds they had never seen before. Bit by bit, the food people ate became something they did not grow or gather directly, but something they bought with something else called money. Electricity arrived, and suddenly, there was no need to move through a day with the rhythms of the sun.
As the effects of these changes have continued to develop over the generations, we humans have not only gotten disconnected from nature.
We have forgotten that we are nature.
We have forgotten our non-fictional reality.
When we remember that we are nature, we know that — as with everything in nature — collaboration and interdependence are how we were created to function.
We were not created to force anything.
Do you see flowers forcing their blooming? No.
They just unfold, gradually, over time.
We are like flowers.
We need to let ourselves unfold.
Our conscious mind can be like a witness to the unfolding.
But it won’t make anything happen. More, it will allow.
Co-creating with Life is our actual reality.
Allowing Life to move through us is our actual reality.
Collaborating with everything around us is our actual reality.
Acknowledging our inescapable interdependence with everyone, and everything, around is is our actual reality.
Of course, the diseased messages of our dominant culture are the opposite of these realities. Forcing. Domination. Control. Extraction. Individuality. Acquisition. Supremacy. Winning. And so on.
And those are the messages we absorb and spread every day.
Do you see how diseased we are?
Do you see how far our culture has brought us from our actual reality, as human beings — the one we’d be living in if we weren’t forcing fictions?
Do you see how much we need to let go?
Do you see how much healing we have to do?
Can you see the path of liberation ahead?
Nature is Diverse
There is not a lot we need to do in order to heal ourselves and our culture, to encounter our collective liberation.
In fact, if we stop fighting who we actually are, and how we actually are, our intelligent beings will naturally find their way to wholeness.
Remember: we humans are nature.
Remember: nature, unimpeded by any external force, naturally moves toward health, healing, wholeness.
Remember: nature, in its most pure state, is a riot of diversity.
So.
We need to stop resisting reality.
We need to stop forcing fictions.
We need to stop telling lies.
We need to let go of this myth that we can or should control the world around us… and then relax into co-existence with everything around us, just as all the birds in the trees, and the flowers in the fields, and the stars in the sky are.
We are not here to dominate or control or force — anyone or anything.
We are here to co-exist.
We are here to relax… and be.
We are here to love.
How can you start moving towards this co-existence, this relaxation, this love, this interdependence as your way of being… today?
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