And guess what? You would be too.

Anger is a Weapon

But not one that has ever benefited me. Anger is like the gun my family would have told me to pull on my attacker: sounds helpful, but is only ever turned against you.

They’re used to being the center of their own narrative. They’re used to being given what they want. They’re used to being allowed to bully and harass the little girls all they want without consequences. It’s the little girls who are told not to react because the little boy is just looking for a reaction, it’s the little girls who are told to manage the way they respond to abuse. We don’t tell the boys to stop harassing. We never tell the men that what they’re doing is harassment. How could we? The narrative is stacked against us.

What if I told?

Well, then I’d be fighting everyone. Fighting the narrative that says this doesn’t happen to good girls. Fighting the women who have only found their own safety in shadows. Fighting the men who’s reputation is at stake. Fighting the organization who’s reputation is at stake. Fighting my own trauma and fear and boiling rage and urge to vomit.

It’s Easier

To let the fight die. To simply die.

Yes, I’m aware that it’s not July 4. August 15, 2017 happens to be the 70th anniversary of the day a different country broke away as politically independent of England: India.

A Unique Independence

Few things inspire more passion, more violence, than the struggle for freedom. Political independence always requires a fight of some kind, but on August 14th and 15th, 1947 the world learned that the fight doesn’t require violence. While the independence movement in India and Pakistan was not entirely bloodless, ultimately England agreed to let them go peacefully. This peaceful independence was unique and influential, and owes much to Gandhi and his philosophy of Satyagraha.

Satyagraha

People often use words like “civil disobedience” or “nonviolence” to describe Gandhi’s approach, but Gandhi himself preferred the term satyagraha. This term was coined specifically for India’s independence movement, and as Gandhi explained, “truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence.” In crafting as well as interpreting the word, Gandhi took care to keep force central to satyagraha and his nonviolent approach.

Many interpreted nonviolence as weakness, but the satyagraha Gandhi practiced and preached not only requires but also grants great force. After all, the practitioners of satyagraha (called satyagrahi) were faced with misunderstandings, anger, and hatred from within and without, which are circumstances that make holding firmly to truth and love very difficult. Ultimately however the force each individual put into the movement created a collective force that proved strong enough to overthrow imperialism.

Be Victorious

Using satyagraha to overthrow a government drastically changes the word overthrow because it usually implies violence. With satyagraha however, the aim is not to defeat through physical force, but rather through voluntary conversion; as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, “in the end, there is neither defeat nor victory but rather a new harmony.” The harmony that Gandhi sought for his country is made obvious by the fact that he didn’t focus simply on the single issue of political independence from Britain but also worked for equal rights for all within Indian society.

Today

Even as we celebrate India and Pakistan’s independence and the crumbling of imperialism, we still deal with the reverberations of our ancestors’ actions.

Bigotry and hatred are all around us. A simple call to nonviolence is inadequate, but I for one am going to study further Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha. A simplified version of Gandhi’s nonviolent approach can and has been used to silence marginalized people, but anybody who espouses Satyagraha needs to know that this kind of nonviolence comes from an honest examination of what the truth truly is.

One of the more common Gandhi quotes is a call to “be the change you wish to see in the world,” and so I am starting with myself. Just like every one of you reading this, I have unconscious biases to unlearn, and I have listening to do. Because I want to hold firmly to the truth; I want to help create that new harmony where a greater truth and justice is understood by society at large.

“For the Trump voters, Trump’s racism may have been just part of the package deal, the Cinemax they had accept to get the HBO. For those who are the target of that racism (and sexism, and homophobia), however, it’s not Cinemax. It’s their lives.”

via The Cinemax Theory of Racism — Discover

Once upon a time I went to Whole Foods (don’t worry, I wasn’t buying anything, just giving someone a ride). After browsing the aisles of overpriced foods and receiving an almost shocking level of help from the lady behind the cheese counter (apparently they let you leave your post there if you’re showing a customer where something is), we were ready to leave with our dairy-free dairy products (yeah, it sounds a little oxymoronic to me too, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do when you’ve got allergies). But that’s when it happened…

I made eye contact with this gorgeous hippy girl; dark brown hair, the thick rimmed glasses so popular around Portland… Hippies are hard to pin down sometimes, so I thought for half a moment that I had a chance! And then her eyes kept moving. And didn’t come back.

“Well she’s obviously straight” I said to my friend. “I was making eyes at her! And she didn’t even give me a second glance.” Because really, who wouldn’t be into me? I was wearing my bike shorts and everything, so I had plenty of muscles to show off. And obviously the only women who can resist my muscles are the straight ones.

I biked all the way home from work once, so I know that part’s possible. Theoretically I can get to work too, and there’s this bike challenge coming up that I want to actually be putting in miles for… So I decided to try this whole biking all the way to work thing. But that’s nine and a half miles, and more importantly, that’s over 800 feet of elevation change, so it’s the sort of thing you work up to. But I made the mistake of telling the team captain of the bike challenge that I’m planning on working up to this crazy commute/daily workout… and then he so kindly announced to the entire staff this morning that I’m going to be biking all the way to and from work every day. I guess I’m committed now…

In that my ass hurts real bad. But also in that I just did the impossible! I biked from Portland to Beaverton. The most direct route seems to be nine miles, but it doesn’t have very good bike lanes, and it’s a bit hillier, so I took the nine and a half mile route. And you thought my 7-8 mile commute was bad…. At least that was much flatter. My glutes already miss that hill from 24th and Burnside up to the Japanese Garden.

I started training in early May, so I’ve been training for two months. But before that? Well, I decided to run this half-marathon about a year ago thanks to my good friend Charlie Brown (ok yeah, you caught me, his real name isn’t Charlie Brown, that’s just what I call him). And before that? I ran cross country through middle school and high school. Most of my friends thought I was insane for doing that – I voluntarily competed in a 4k one to two times per week during the first two months of school, not to mention training runs that could be as long as 5 miles or 60 minutes. Now that I’ve ran a whole 13.1 miles in two hours and twenty minutes that doesn’t sound so long to me anymore, but in high school it was a big deal. It was hard and it was hot and sometimes I hated it. So why did I stay on the team? To stay fit partly. But I could have chosen volleyball or basketball or even made a big fuss and joined the football team if I really wanted to. Why is running my sport?

Well there’s the process of elimination reasoning, but there’s also the fact that I genuinely enjoy running. I trace it all back to when I was about six years old and went to an after-school track and field camp. I don’t know how I ended up there, I just know that the high school track team was showing a bunch of us elementary school kids around and introducing us to the different field events. Then a few of the high-school girls rounded up those of us who wanted to see the cross country course. I was hooked immediately, it was just like going for a hike, but with a little running mixed in. I remember talking my mom into driving me back to the high school later that week just so that I could run the Estacada cross country course one more time.

So really, I’ve been planning on being a runner for 14 years now. And I’ve finally worked my way up to a half-marathon. Soon it’ll be full marathons, and even ultra-marathons!