Carol A. Hand

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I woke up this morning. Late, of course, when defined by daylight savings time. Sunlight was streaming through the eastern window. But when I awoke, a gentle but stunning realization dawned as a simple question ran through my mind.

“What happens if you put good people in an evil place?”

It’s a paraphrase of the question Dr. Phillip Zimbardo said he wanted to explore in his famous experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment.

Another thought quickly followed.

“I have been in evil places. Many of them. And I survived despite a tender heart that was ripped open by intense suffering. Both my suffering and that of others who were vulnerable.”

A sense of gratitude followed from knowing that I did my best to hold true to integrity and protect myself and others from the most destructive harm anyway. I got up every morning and walked in to face the fire, knowing that it was an experiment to see if it was possible to transform evil systems.

Although I made many mistakes in my journey, strength came from the ancestors who sometimes appeared to me and the wise beings who visited me in dreams. They taught me that compassion comes from forgiving one’s self as a necessary foundation for forgoing the need to demonize others for the choices they make.

“Mistakes are, after all,
the foundations of truth,
and if a man does not know
what a thing is, it is at
least an increase in knowledge
if he knows what it is not.”
(Carl Jung)

Thanks to Eddie Two Hawks for sharing this quote in a recent post.

I look at the state of the world today and know that I am just one unimportant person among billions. There is little I can do to affect change in the systems that harm others. That’s a choice only each individual must make for themselves. It’s a choice that one makes each moment.

I am inspired by the choices Diane Lefer recently shared on her blog, Nobody Wakes Up Pretty, about those who are working to address the egregious harm being done along the border with Mexico in the name of “Making America Great Again.” Diane’s work reminds me of something written more than a century ago by Jane Addams when she and the women of Hull-House in Chicago lived among newly arrived immigrants in the poorest of city neighborhoods.

“. . . the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life” (Jane Addams, 1961, p. 76).

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May we all continue to make wise, compassionate choices to use whatever gifts we have to build a kinder world.

Work Cited:

Jane Addams (1961). Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York, NY: Signet Classics.