Oppressive systems are not inevitable. UUSC’s global partners show us this truth again and again. In the six years I have been working with UUSC, I have had the privilege of meeting many of our partners and hearing their stories of devastation, resilience, imagination, and hope. Our partners demonstrate that it’s possible to live and work in ways that center community care, accountability, and global solidarity. These ways of being come about when enough people choose to act from a place of love rather than fear. When small acts of courage, imagination, and gratitude build upon each other, another world is possible.
I have been thinking about courage, imagination, and hope in this particular season of contradictions. In our land, the harvest is over. We are in a season that echoes through the memories of our ancestors as one of gratitude for the earth and labor which has made another year of life possible. This is a time for gathering with community to share food and stories as we enter the insular winter months.
And now, in our land, we are also in a season of immense cruelty and manufactured scarcity. We are witnessing our neighbors abducted from their homes, from courtrooms, and off our streets. Our children, elders, and so many others are deprived of food and medical care. Those who have little to begin with are forced to try to survive with even less so that the wealthiest can hoard more.
It’s maddening, isn’t it? We witness such destruction and malice all while knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way. We bear witness while knowing that survival is not a zero-sum game. We bear witness while rejecting a worldview that says that everything and everyone is ultimately a commodity; to be sold, used, exploited, and discarded in service of profit and the power that profit brings. We reject the model that ranks all creation as either “mine” or “not mine,” or, perhaps “not mine, yet.”
For those of us with deep wells of empathy and strong ethical convictions, it is painful to witness the harm being inflicted all around us. We can use this pain as an excuse to look away, or, as many of us are doing, we can use it to incite action.
When we view our world, our fellow humans, and our very existence as the gifts they are, as opposed to resources we might control or discard according to our whims, gratitude comes to the center of our lives. If everything is a gift, then the natural response is gratitude and reciprocity. We orient ourselves to community care.
Whether it’s UUSC’s support of our global partners, a mutual aid or global solidarity effort, a food pantry collection, voting drive, ICE facility protest, or pro-democracy rally, we know what community care looks like in practice. We take action not because we are guaranteed that tomorrow everything will change, but because we have a responsibility to push forward.
That responsibility calls us to take physical action and make financial commitments. Justice movement work is only possible when people join together and act out of love and abundance. When you support UUSC, you stock the pantries of people in migration, furnish the apartments of LGBTQI+ asylum seekers, champion the innovation of folks on the front lines of the climate crisis, and so much more. We invite you to join our year-end giving campaign and live your values of justice and interdependence.
Our steadfast values show us the way. Our justice-loving ancestors show us the way. Our global partners in the movement for human rights and climate justice show us the way. Together we will continue to mourn and resist, disrupt and heal, weep, sing, dance, and imagine. We will share abundantly so that all may live, planting seeds of justice wherever we are. Together, we will co-create a world where all may flourish.
