Outcry: a strong expression of public anger and disapproval
This week I dreamed about being detained when traveling, taken aside in an airport and made to wait and wait and wait … It became clear that I was being monitored and considered dangerous and essentially arrested.
What started in the airport turned into a full detention / internment / concentration camp experience. The dream’s details are sketchy, but I remember feeling powerless. I couldn’t call for help. I couldn’t change my circumstances. I couldn’t get free.
I woke crying out, chilled, and deeply shaken—and also relatively shielded by my lived experience within whiteness and U.S. citizenship: both of which are connected to today’s camps and their connection with white supremacy. Within this context of everyday and systemic oppression, my body was alerting me that it’s holding intense pain, reckoning with how people are living out this horror and how there’s urgent intervention needed. Needed now.
Awake from my dream and surrounded by dark silence, I thought about actions I’ve taken: from sharing articles, signing petitions, and posting “take action” lists to donating to legal support groups like RAICES and the ACLU.
These actions are far too small, too incomplete, too insignificant, and too impersonal. Still, these actions and so many more are needed.
I thought, too, about the need for everyday resistance, which exceeds any election day or national crisis. For the need for a collective outcry. For repeated “strong expression of public anger and disapproval.”
I want to be part of sustained, strong, collective, and LOUD outcry—an outcry that’s represented in hashtags like #AbolishICE and #CloseTheCamps and the related #AbolishCBP, #AbolishPrisons, #EndPrivatePrisons, and #EndMassIncarceration.
So, what’s clear to me is the need to repeat and repeat and repeat—strongly, as public outcry—anger and disapproval at detaining and imprisoning people.
Though speaking up is undoubtedly too small, too incomplete, too insignificant, and too impersonal, it’s also non-negotiable.
So, I’m repeating—to myself and publicly—and will continue repeating:
Speak up. Write up. Stand up. SHOUT! Repeat.
Feel. Think. Do. With the voice shaking. Imperfectly. Consistently. Repeat.
Cry out. Wail. Lament. Grieve. Ache. Rage. Repeat.
Look squarely at complicity. Feel the contours of it. Know the depth of it. Repeat.
Stoke the fire. Keep it burning. Use it to act. Repeat.
Try, try again. And again. And again. Repeat.
Exclaim. Express. Roar. At night. In the day. Personally. Publicly. “This isn’t right!”
Repeat.
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This post is written by Beth Godbee, Ph.D. for Heart-Head-Hands.com. For more posts like this one, you might try “For White Friends Using Social Media and Not Responding to Charlottesville” and “Speaking Up by Speaking Aloud Embodied Responses.”
To invest in ongoing self-work and deep-diving into conditioned ways of living, being, and intervening in the world, you might also consider the self-paced e-course, “40 Questions for 40 Walks: Toward Everyday Living for Justice.”
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