This is another Term of Endearment post.
A friend brought this to my attention by recommending this book: Dignity: It’s Essential Role in Resolving Conflict by Donna Hicks. I am most of the way through it, but do not want to delay addressing the big concepts held inside.
Also hoping the core idea will support destabilization of cruel ICE activities in Minnesota.
In my view, more cardinal than protection, dignity is a quiet, personal state that may contain a wall of psychological privacy, with an understood mandate that respects the human body as a container of that. Dignity is person-hood in a nutshell, or maybe person-hood inside a skin suit full of stories, legacies, cultural histories, ancestral knowledge, and personal associations.
Respecting dignity means respecting any given person’s lineage and journey, even if you don’t understand it. It also means, respecting human bodies, needs, and others’ support structures too. To me, it also means respecting the pillars that hold up communities (and I’m not talking tacky Trumpian gold-plated columns either 👎🏻).
I feel like dignity also represents an energetic safe space that recognizes the sanctity of an individual’s personal journey as much as their role. Dignity is like self-respect, in that it doesn’t neatly track with social or class deference, origin, or position. It’s a personal thing. Maybe even a moral thing.
Our democratic experiment, I believe, rests on human dignity. We The People and all of that. But when a government funds and emboldens mob mentality, cruelty, or pirate-like behaviors with a rambling toddler at top (hello Trump-styled government), things need a hard stop.
Evident in the Minneapolis ICE raids, some working-class American families have been financially rewarded for acting as cruel, GOP-sponsored mobs, harming Minnesotans physically and psychologically.
And as Americans, I’d like to reiterate, we just don’t do that here.
The actions of ICE seem based on a lie: that there are ANY people inside our borders don’t belong.
All people belong because they are here, inside our borders today. And we treat people with dignity because that’s who we are. That’s why there is due process, asylum applications, and stellar regard for freedom, families and human rights too.
So many ICE folks are acting violently, not like principled human beings. That’s the problem. They apparently know they are wrong, which is why they hide their faces. And they so desperately want to display might they’ll even alter images to show a dignified person as afraid (when their countenance says otherwise).
So I propose dignity may also be a useful organizing idea for sparking greater respect for humans inside our country’s borders.
Dignity can be an invocation of sorts. And it is needed in word, thought, and deed across all “sides” of this problem.
During these days of ICE raids in our cities and trance-state-like people treating other people like enemies while wearing masks for dollars and tribal protection, I propose dignity may need to be invoked to help us correct the fall of this once steady democratic, high-innovation, high-minded experiment called United States of America.
Human dignity is what needs to be invoked, not an outdated and ill-defined national identity. Which, let’s face it, likely contains shame from its earliest days of overtaking indigenous lands and the utilization of slavery as economic drivers for the greedy few.
I have always understood the American Way to include soft power as much as might: support of neighbors and allies, promotion of basic human rights across the globe, allowance of innovation, class mobility, geographical mobility, civil (not religious) beliefs, cross-cultural pollination, and beautiful and protected open spaces.
A silver lining
The mob-styled, misguided ICE behaviors are actually strengthening the very communities they are attacking, and all the connected and observant communities too. We see them with our own eyes on the news, we hear about fears and experience from friends and witnesses.
And what American communities are not connected within 6 degrees of separation anyway? I have at least 3 connections to Minneapolis through legacy, family, and friends, even though I’ve personally never been. I like them. They don’t put up with bullshit, and they lead progressive, protective and fighting spirit.
But what is also true is that ICE, wearing masks like bandits, are also ashamed. Their uniforms prove it.
While ICE has been deployed – seemingly as retribution– in cities like Minneapolis, I’ve found myself trying to hone in on the right thing to fight. Desiring to act judiciously, preferably supporting a death blow that ends this very crappy, inhumane battle, instead of engaging endlessly in a culture devolving into insanity.
But the search for such a thing may be in and of itself fruitless. Emmanual Macron said the other night right now there are over 60 wars, even if several are fixed. The reasons people fight are many, but I’ll surmise most have to do with resource allocation and lifestyle, and all of them have to do with dignity.
Dignity is a common ground nearly all people can stand on. Regardless if a person is a radicalized Maga-ite, or progressive, a dismayed liberal, or member of a marginalized community, or even standing in a politically powerful role, all of us have some shame perhaps, some hidden ideals and fears, and also the desire to be accepted and respected despite them.
Giving dignity means invoking it plainly, by name.
No matter who we are, we tend to want our personal dignity respected and upheld. And this includes, respect for personal safety, preservation of family and community, and respect for ideals. IE individuals’ and communities’ self-set North Stars.
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT 😉
Interesting piece about Leonardo da Vinci’s watery chaos here. I was searching for a quality rain ripple art to illustrate how dignity spreads through communities, and found his life long study of water to be a pretty big idea to study another time. I don’t think I’d like to get permission I’d like right now to use the image I’d like to include here, so will chase another source.
