What if I told you that there was an unprovoked shooting on a group of Black people in Clinton, Mississippi, today?
Would you be upset, desensitized? Would you ask more questions, attempting to find the silver lining in the situation?
This event occurred on September 4, 1875 — after the slaves were supposedly emancipated, and ten years after the American Civil War.
And yet, headlines like this continue to dominate our media today, because sadly, it is still such a prominent phenomenon.
Reversing the insanity in our communities
It is possible to do the same thing over and over again and get different results.
But how?
You have been at your workplace, at the organization, doing your chosen skill for a while now, and you still do not seem to get the results you want.
A simple way to affect the narrative is to change the things you are doing. Once. When you find that your circumstances have shifted, continue to do that new change from now on.
This technique is a way you can do something over and over again and get different results — embrace change, but be patient enough to persevere. You do not need to announce your change. The outcome will speak for itself.
Fighting against evolving perspectives
Many citizens in American society are stuck in some negative psychological feedback loop where a traumatic event or many occurrences begin to color one’s worldview and decision making overall.
While this is part of normal neural development and in some cases protective — it facilitates learning about the world and its dangers through a process that researchers call heuristics — it can hinder personal growth a person does not consider other facts.
This process is part of what fosters racism, classism, and whatever “ism” there is out there.
Changing the changes around you
Because of these “isms,” is critical to do several things:
Understand that you are the author of your own story. While you may not pick where you are born, the class you are, sex, parents, or anything else external to you, it is up to you to remain lucid enough to shape and tell your own story, with your words, in your way.
Stop and think before you agree to anything. What are the effects of the agreement? Sometimes we align ourselves with causes, people, and places that do not have our best interests at heart.
Do not get stuck in presentism. Presentism is the idea or behavior of assuming that historical or future events will be, can be, or have been affected by the present. An example of this is the assumption that people had cellular phones widely accessible to them in 1994, or that TikTok is going to be very important in 2030.
Karma Compass 