I’m sitting in a coffee shop. It’s high summer in Portland. There’s the usual backdrop: coffee beans surrendering their abundance to the grinder, barista utensils clattering into motion and that burst of steam that, today, sounds most like the explosive exhale of a kid who’s held her breath as long as she can.

Threading through is the canned music. The current crooner observing: “Everyone is lonely.”

I’ve just looked back on my blog list. Since the election in November of 2018, I’ve slowed way down. This has not gone missing on me. It hasn’t felt good. Doing the math I’m seeing that my every-other-week posting essentially dropped off a cliff. In 20 months, my usual 40 dropped to 8.

It hasn’t been for lack of feeling or watching. It’s not for lack of love for the written word. But I’ve lost confidence.

This, I’m realizing, is one way I’m complicit with a system I claim to oppose.

Let me say that more clearly. In public expression, my country is unrecognizable to me. My worldview keeps being shattered by policy moves and governmentally sanctioned events that seem to me shortsighted at the least, grossly inhumane at the worst.

For most all of my life, I’ve had the privilege of being supported … well, mostly … by these systems. So supported, I didn’t even know it. But, these days are revealing the unflattering fact that my relative comfort, kept me from seeing the full intensity of invisibility experienced by people marginal to those systems.

This sense of being lost – unmoored – adrift – powerless – it’s been the daily bread of my African American, Latino/a/x, Arabic, Native American, Asian-American, older, disabled, and gender diverse family and friends – and all in their communities. “Welcome to the world,” they’ve said.

Some have also said, “But, never give up.”

My words have been lonely. So have I. This loneliness is a downside of privilege. But vital, as it turns out. Vital because, if it finely gets excruciating enough, it points undeniably to the way privilege systems hurt everyone – even those who benefit.

Colonizers are the most colonized. If colonizers are understood to be entering other people’s land un-invited to then, by force or social manipulation, impose their ways as the only acceptable ways – and if we who have descended and benefitted from these actions come to fully understand this definition, then we must also see that we have been living as what the Pit River Indians call Inalladui – people who are dead inside. How else can any of us stand by while 2000 children are still separated from their parents on the southern borders of our nation? How else can we tolerate today’s policies of cruelty to people, communities, the air we breathe and the water we drink, the animals, mountains and trees?

Colonizers who begin to see what we’ve done – what we’re doing – can, like I have, choose to isolate.

But here’s how colonial privilege turns on itself. The privilege to isolate can be used for slowing down – pulling in – unplugging. Warning: It feels like insanity. It’s not, but the seduction to giving in is intense. A professor of human physiology and anthropology recently described what’s happening. “Cortisol,” she said. “The levels of cortisol measured in blood work done on everyday people having everyday physical exams over the past 20 months have skyrocketed.” She continued, “Cortisol is always higher in people who are in trauma, or survivors of it. High cortisol is a frighteningly accurate predictor of susceptibility to suicide.”

Feeling crazy in the face of what is happening in our country, having the dawning understanding of these circumstances as direct expressions of the privilege system that we’ve nurtured our whole lives, and isolating. All are normal. But they are not places to stop.

Do not kill yourself.

Do not avoid feeling the grief and confusion.

Instead use your privilege, your isolation, to rest – to get clear as you can. Reach out to people who love you. Look outside. Spend time out there. Register the miracles in every day – the common miracles like lily’s in bloom, children playing, trees of all different varieties standing near one another, making shade, and getting along just fine. Then set forth on something. Write. Speak. Feed hungry people. Offer to visit people who can’t leave their homes. Contact the people we’ve elected. Do this often. And, yes – march, carry signs, tweet the dignifying hashtags. Listen to people. Cry when you need to.

Rest and reflection can fuel revolutions. Big loud revolutions – and quieter persistent ones. Some of the most powerful applications of privilege are the ones, loud and quiet, that use unmerited access to see and dismantle systems of privilege that exist off other people’s backs.

….

The coffee shop has filled. Soft conversation mixes with the sound track, with the whisper and clang of coffee production. I glance through the room at this collection of wild and precious lives. The older white man who just walked in on this rubber cleated cycling shoes, reaching to unclip his helmet and sporting a decidedly pink Il Pirata shirt. The black man who arrived just after I did this morning walks out to take another cigarette break. Earlier, he told me he lives on the streets. “With God’s good people,” he said. When he spoke that into the coffee shop long before it filled, the trans woman barista with her full and flawless alto voice said, “Earl, you can’t fool me. There’s not a body you’ve met that you don’t see as one of God’s good people.”

“That’s right,” said Earl. “That’s just right.”

Earl sees everyone as God’s being. No one can take that away from him.

And here, I exhale. This is why I write.