Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Just as every event provides a learning, every event provides an opportunity. The choice to see and seize it is ours.

The times are a troubling. What’s new? Everything is new; nothing is new.

The times present us with the choice to shrug or to learn. We are paying the tuition by living in troubling times, are we denying ourselves the education?

In the same vein, the troubling times provide us with opportunities. Are we seeing and seizing the opportunities, or shrugging?

This weekend (I write early in June 2020), people are crying—literally crying tears of anguish and heartbreak—because some persons are treating some other persons as if they were not persons. That is awful.

The injustice is also an opportunity. We can now take the big injustice and exemplify it by showing how we can be more human, humane, and just in our workplace.

In the past, such as two months ago, such calls would be derided as naive. This weekend, however, well, we are not so quick to deny injustice no matter how large or small. This is an opportunity.

This is not a call for “you can’t let a good crisis go to waste.” I find that manipulative, unethical, and unjust.

This is a call for, “Did you notice something? What can we do starting right here, right now, with the persons in this room? With me and you?”