It's been a little while since I've posted. I've been thinking about the year to come and mulling over the healthiest ways to make it through. I love to read, so one of my goals for this year is to read more diverse books, books to help me understand other people's perspectives. Our experiences shape who we are and how we function in the world, so this year, I want to read about others' experiences (especially those who grew up in a different way or place than I did) and how they see the world. I can't travel the world and speak to all of the fascinating people I'd like to learn more about, so I'll have to settle for reading their words. I hope to find others who've read their work, too, to discuss the things we've learned from them. I started with Caitlin Moran's Moranifesto, and loved it. She is a feminist writer from the UK and is witty, thoughtful, and, I discovered, a lot of fun to read. She writes with what I found to be a sensible voice on topics of poverty, feminism, and what it means to be a responsible person in the world.
The next person I got to know was Trevor Noah. His book, Born a Crime, is a series of essays on his life growing up in South Africa, both pre- and post-apartheid. I can't recommend these two authors enough. Moran is hilarious, and covers topics of feminism, politics, and raising girls with a sense a humor that made me laugh out loud as I was listening to it. Noah was raised in a system meant to keep him down, and does a lovely job of describing why apartheid held for as long as it did, and how difficult a job his mother had in raising him to be a good man. He has one paragraph that resonated with me:
In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don't see the person it affects. We don't see their face. We don't see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood (this is how he refers to the areas of South Africa that blacks were forced to live in) was built in the first place, to keep the victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mind. Because if white people ever saw black people as human, they would see that slavery is unconscionable. We live in a world where we don't see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don't live with them. It would be a lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see another's pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.
Wow, right?! And it's only January! I'm looking forward to finding some voices that I wouldn't normally read, and learning from them. Anything you've been reading that I should know about? Next up for me is March, Book Three by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. (Thanks Bev!) It's the National Book Award winner for Young People's Literature. John Lewis is that guy who's "all talk, talk, talk, no action." *sigh*
Tomorrow I am off to D.C. to join hundreds of thousands of other people for the Women's March on Washington. I'm excited and apprehensive, and wishing I didn't have to go. More about that later :)
Until next time, carry on and hold the line.
