{"id":79613,"date":"2019-09-10T16:45:37","date_gmt":"2019-09-10T21:45:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=79613"},"modified":"2019-09-10T15:16:42","modified_gmt":"2019-09-10T20:16:42","slug":"the-view-from-the-balcony-re-evaluating-beliefs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/the-view-from-the-balcony-re-evaluating-beliefs\/","title":{"rendered":"The View from the Balcony: Re-evaluating Beliefs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A\nfew days ago, someone called me out on something. It upset me so much that when\nI woke up the next morning I was on the verge of tears. I wasn\u2019t upset about having\nbeen called out, though. I was upset that I might have unintentionally hurt\nsome people and that I might have been mischaracterized about something truly\nimportant to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This\nstarted as I was telling a story about a lovely encounter on an airplane with\ntwo young parents and their baby. I thought the parents had done an amazing job\ncaring for their child in a difficult situation. As a psychotherapist who works\nwith families, I commended them on their parenting. As part of my description\nof the couple I used the term \u201cinterracial.\u201d Suddenly I found myself on the\nwitness stand in a caring, hyper-focused court of higher consciousness\u2014a heart\nawareness inquisition, if you will. There were two levels to this: 1) the\nlanguage itself, and 2) why I said it at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I learned that the term \u201cinterracial,\u201d when used as I did, can carry a similar racist connotation for many people as the \u201cN\u201d word. Mea culpa. I\u2019m going to plead ignorance, fall on my sword, and beg forgiveness. I was not aware that \u201cinterracial\u201d was sometimes a pejorative term. Now that I do, I know better than to use it as I did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Tougher, though is the question of why I\nmade that distinction in the first place, and these were the things I was\nchallenged to grapple with:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pointing out the racial differences of\nthe couple wasn\u2019t necessary. It wasn\u2019t germane to the point I was making. Why\nwould I highlight the couple\u2019s racial differences when it wasn\u2019t a factor? If they\u2019d\nbeen verbally accosted for being from different racial backgrounds and I was\ndescribing that event, then, sure. It would have mattered. But it didn\u2019t here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If one of them had been morbidly obese\nand the other as thin as a piece of vermicelli, would I have pointed that out?\nIf one had been 20\u201330 years older than the other, would I have included that\ninformation? If one had been Jewish and the other Buddhist, would I have said\nthat? Probably not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer to why I included this\ninformation is, I think, largely from having been reared in a culture that\nnoticed those outer differences and was neither enlightened enough to recognize\nthe inherent racism in that, nor caring and willing enough to face the truth.\nTo tackle such a line of questioning without defensiveness can be daunting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is this PC gone amuck? I don\u2019t think so.\nWhy? If this world is ever going to come to a place where our\ninterconnectedness is honored, we must do this work, and we must do it with a\nsoul-desire to be aware of self and others to the highest degree possible. Yes,\nthere are those who are oversensitive to just about anything we might do or\nsay, but that\u2019s no reason to let ourselves off the hook when it comes to\nunderstanding and caring. And as conscious, highly evolved, aware, and\nsensitive as I might think I am, I still have a lot to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was processing this with a friend who\nhas, as one of her spiritual gifts, the keen ability to distill things down to\ntheir essence in a remarkably insightful and concise way. She said that in all\nmy wordiness, I was simply trying to say that sometimes we need to re-evaluate\nour beliefs and possibly make changes in them. Our beliefs aren\u2019t facts anyway.\nOur beliefs come from our values and regular assessment of our values is sorely\nneeded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did I enjoy having light shed on one of the\ndirty corners in my belief system? Hell, no! But I\u2019m glad it happened, and I\u2019m\nglad I was willing to hear the hard stuff. Otherwise the filth would still be\nthere. I\u2019ve got enough of that already.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026and that\u2019s the view from The Balcony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days ago, someone called me out on something. It upset me so much that when I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":39753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11902],"tags":[8851,5,10286,13250,10878],"class_list":["post-79613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-randy-weeks","tag-column","tag-mississippi","tag-randy-weeks","tag-the-view","tag-the-view-from-the-balcony"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/2017-5-11-View-from-the-Balcony.jpg?fit=600%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}