i cannot make you care but maybe i can make you think

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 - 1968)


Is there a punchline to this? Is there some hidden joke or invisible clause that says oh wait a minute, injustice anywhere is contigent upon those defining justice and those defining justice obviously retain the power to decide who then is responsible for injustice?

I am presenting a chapter in two weeks on the rights of transgender people to safe and adequate (and affordable) healthcare.
I am presenting a slideshow in two weeks on WHY a gay pride parade in Idaho is relevant to those who fight for the very basic human and civil rights that others often take for granted.
ALSO, in three weeks, I am defending my honors thesis linking the local history and policy of HIV/AIDS to the national struggle for humanizing those living with HIV/AIDS.

Again and again, the conversations shift to me having to explain WHY one person's struggle should make a damn bit of difference to another...

WHY?????

Why should you care if a transgender prostitute has access to healthcare?
Why should you care if a gay man has AIDS, regardless of questions of risky behavior, education or socioeconomics?
Why should you care if someone a government considers a terrorist or terrorist threat is caged, tortured and held without charge or access to legal counsel?
Why should you care if Idahoans march in a parade?
Why should you care if someone feels offended by a religious monument inside a courthouse?
Why should you care if a President or any leader can claim his or herself and his or her nation exempt from any sort of international law that is deemed unfriendly to the whatever NOTIONS that nation holds sacred, even those of freedom and democracy?

WHY?


I keep going back to the quote by one of the most highly regarded civil rights leaders EVER and wonder exactly where the punchline is, if such effort will remain a joke.

For sanity's sake, I HIGHLY recommend the fantastic essay by Maia Ettinger titled, "The Pocahontas Paradigm, or will the Subaltern please shut up?" from the book Tilting the Tower edited by Linda Garber. Here's a quote so that you might see why:
"An interesting thing happens when people of color or queers speak up in class: everyone else feels silenced...In this case, however, race and sex categories are both over- and under inclusive." She explains that this "everyone else" includes what she calls, "People lacking an Agenda (PLAs), people whose interest in race, class and gender is grounded in something other than the need to survive in an alien culture and/or to assess in good faith their own position in the multiple systems of subordination that constitute the culture."

Why? Why should you care? Why should anyone?

Is injustice anywhere, injustice everywhere or is that just a nice turn of phrase?

What possible good is an education that touts critical thinking if one is neither encouraged nor expected to engage in the very debates that do make us uncomfortably and sometimes painfully aware that yes this privilege IS a result of someone else's oppression and that maybe even this FREEDOM IS precisely because someone else is caged.

What possible right can exist as a privilege? Either it is a right that the law will protect OR it is a privilege the law can ignore and even be bent to take away.

Where is the human in human rights if not in every SINGLE human being regardless of sex, religious orientation, race, class, education, family history or legal status?


I am excited about my projects. I am excited because I see every sentance as a chance to engage in an debate far larger than the borders of this state or this country. I see each discussion had and each lecture attended and each coffee shop debate as a chance to refuse and refute the comfort of silence and invisibilty.

In short, I see them as not only a chance but a part of the responsibility that an education entails and the quote and the legacy of King and others EXPECTS of all of us.