Building Unity Now: Standing for Humans and Opposing All Oppressions
We are three International Liberation Reference People who want to emphasize our commitment to the following: liberation from all distress, opportunity for all, and communities characterized by justice.
We have come together to express our commitment to unity and to take (and encourage everyone to take) a public stand against any forces that try to manipulate and divide us.
A HISTORICAL MOMENT
We want to acknowledge the significance, and danger, of this historical moment. In the past, during similar moments, great harm and human suffering resulted because people failed to turn toward unification and liberation.
As RCers, we have an opportunity to play a significant role at this crucial time—we can help to shape and reframe human history.
Late-stage monopoly capitalism is collapsing and desperate. More and more of the world’s resources are being put into the hands of a few, while the working class is being distracted and divided.
Fascism is rising around the globe. The following are being manipulated to that end: racism, Islamophobia, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, fear of disabled people, linguicism (fear of people who speak non-Western-European languages), nativism, nationalism, and more.
Fear is being used to mobilize people. Those in power are encouraging and widely using violence, including pursuing wars for the purpose of profit. All of this is happening in the context of unprecedented destruction of the environment.
In Re-evaluation Counseling, we recognize the following:
- It is not enough to privately oppose these developments. We need to speak up and take action publicly—and discharge, so we can do that.
- Systems of oppression have always used the divide-and-conquer strategy to maintain their power. We must be united to turn this historical tide. We cannot fight among ourselves in our own constituencies, or against other constituencies.
- We need to create the conditions that will allow us to speak with the voice of a united people.
PROPOSED ACTIONS
We encourage us all to do the following:
- Organize and sponsor “think and listen” sessions in our communities, and train people to listen
- Use every opportunity to speak up—in our homes, our workplaces, our social places, the political sphere, and more—about the goodness of all people and the unity among our peoples
- Find and create opportunities to oppose division and separation
- Find and create opportunities to meet separately in caucus groups and then together across identity groups (there is no contradiction between being for our own people and at the same time being for each other’s people)
We can discharge on the following:
- feelings of discouragement, despair, and hopelessness
- fears of speaking up
- fears of listening to viewpoints that we disagree with
- difficulties in being fully for our own people and fully for other people
- all that would keep us from building broad-based communities (we tend to limit the kinds of people we get close to and with whom we build our communities; we still often feel small and vulnerable, but we are not any longer; we can listen to all points of view)
- early memories of Jews and Muslims
- our religious backgrounds (each of us has a religious—or non-religious or anti-religious—background, and we need to discharge on it to be able to see beyond its boundaries)
- where we are still vulnerable to being confused about each other’s peoples
- where we made a decision to “go it alone,” to be separate; feelings about being divided
- courage and integrity
In the coming period, we each need to choose a perspective consistent with the upward trend—a perspective of hope, courage, and connection.
In full unity,