Silence as privilege

I was snapping photos of pretty flowers on campus today while feeling guilty about snapping photos of pretty flowers. How can I be looking at pansies when our world seems to be falling apart?! No one wants to look at photos of flowers when racism is rampant and people are dying on the street! How can I be so frivolous?

It strikes me that one sign of privilege is the ability to remain silent, to sit back and look at pretty flowers until all the fuss dies down. Plenty of others are writing impassioned pleas for social justice or marching with the oppressed or posting emotional memes on Facebook, so no one will notice if I just remain silent and wait for everything to return to normal.

But here's the thing: I don't want everything to return to normal. If normal means people of color can be attacked and killed and treated like threats with impunity, even by those who ought to be protecting them, then who wants to live in that kind of world? Time to make a new one!

But new worlds are not constructed by people who observe events from a safe distance while sitting on a cozy couch with their feet propped up on the coffee table; in fact, the very idea that the privileged can separate ourselves from the forces roiling our world is an illusion, as Dr. King reminds us in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail":

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

So it's time to be up and doing, standing alongside those who are trying to change the world (while wearing masks and practicing social distancing!). But I hope no one minds if I take some stops along the way to look at the pretty flowers.