When ppl say you can change your own life I believe it 100%. What i don't believe in is avoidance, revisionism, and aversion to being conscious because it makes you feel uncomfortable. It's funny when people are unable to look at their privilege in gratitude to consider what the true cost of it is - outside of their own small cushy bubble. Particularly folk who intend ‘social activism’ and ‘restorative justice’ doing all kinds of mental, emotional and spiritual gymnastics to avoid having to think about the very real things that go on around them on this earth. You could pat yourself on the back with your endeavours, which of course are also important, but which serves you singularly more than those you claim to help. You can say namaste to what’s truly going on if that's where you want to live. But don't diminish the travesties that people endure in this world. Don't tell people they can simply see past the ‘greedy governments’ that systematically & continuously diminish peoples' rights to exist - while you have been afforded many wonderful rights to thrive. It's a privilege to live the way you do. What an abuse of that privilege to tell people to 'get over it' or 'just change your point of view'. What an insult to those you claim to care about to suggest their very real, very tangible disadvantages is simply failure of perspective on their part. What a display of wilful amnesia to pretend the world is not structured as it is to disaffect some while advantaging others. Rather than the holier-than-thou condescension, perhaps you could consider the thousands myriad ways people do change their point of view/lives/communities constantly just to survive - ways you don’t have to so you can focus on the privileges of self-actualisation and self-identification. The myriad ways they have to keep adapting to cruelty, while you turn up a self congratulatory nose at them for not being grateful for the slow death. The ways they have been made to accommodate you and your worldview at the ongoing cost of their communities and wellbeing, so that you can make money off their backs and claim you're changing the world while profiting off a sick broken system.
We need all types, it's true. To shine your light and do your work is what we are all here to do. But unity =/= erasure Potential =/= accepting injustice as the norm It means understanding through empathy and acceptance in understanding, so that we can do better, not just make do.
Image credit: Jenny Holzer, ‘Truisims’ series, 1988.