“There are two kinds of power,” a man once told me, a black minister from South Africa I met in Davis. He’d come to speak about peace at a conference we were holding through the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and so I listened carefully to what he said.
“The kind of power we normally think
of is ‘power – over’: the power of one
person or group over another.” That
helped me understand why I automatically recoiled at the word. Power Over is the greatest source of pain I
can think of, for what it causes us to do to ourselves in defense of the threat
of being overpowered by someone or something as much as the actual fact of it.
“The other kind is ‘power – with,’”
he continued, laying before me pictures of movements of peoples across
continents and across centuries. It is
the power of unions, of co-operatives, of student groups and racial
minorities. In fact, it is the power of
militaries as well: people committed to working together at risk of self for
the benefit of something bigger than themselves. Having just mentally walked through the Last
Supper, that not-so-good cross of Good Friday, and the mysterious disappearance
from the tomb of Easter, it’s not hard to see Jesus’ ministry as another form
of Power With.
Another man once told me of a third
kind of power: Power Under. As a small farmer and a member of this
community, he practiced this kind of power as a means of survival. Many of us do. It’s that “under the radar” form of
self-protection and maintenance, staying out of harm’s way from those with
plenty of Power Over. So many of our
undocumented neighbors have been practicing this form for so long, it makes it
difficult to imagine another way. It
also makes it dangerous.
As our young people have taken to
the streets and the legislatures to protest our inability to protect them from
gun violence in their schools, I have both cheered and wondered. As the recent shooting of Stephon Clark by
police in his grandma’s Sacramento backyard illustrates horribly, once again,
our young black men aren’t safe anywhere.
Neither are the DACA students and their parents, whole families flying
under the radar for years.
Do we have the power to fix any of
this? I think we do, together.
In a New York Times editorial last
week, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens advocated repealing the
Second Amendment. His arguments were
sound and based in the constitution.
Perhaps in the face of losing all gun sales, the NRA’s backers would be
divided and weakened into allowing our legislators to pass regulations against
the worst weapons, the ones we do not need in our closets much less on the
streets. Perhaps if fewer guns were in
our closets and on our streets, our police officers’ fingers would be less
itchy.
Our undocumented neighbors, however,
need another solution. They need us to
come forward into our public forums and speak for them, we who do not need
papers, who do not face having our lives ripped apart by speaking. We need to advocate for legislation to be
passed in Congress to make legal pathways to citizenship for people who are
operating as citizens but flying under the radar. We need to be walking with them in spirit
while they stay low. It’s what our
citizenship allows – and calls us – to do.
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Trudy Wischemann is a
writer who often feels powerless but for words.
You can send her your ideas for reform c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA
93247 or leave a comment below.
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