Maya Brattkus
After reading through
Beautiful Trouble’s principals, one stood out to me as extremely potent; Bring
the Issue Home, and more specifically “Show the human cost.” In many Us vs.
Them situations, we don’t view the other side as human beings, as one of us, as
sensitive, feeling beings who have deep inner workings just like us. We view
them as just that, “Them,” and losing the sight of humanity can be harmful. As
it says on the site, “When the Iraq War was raging, mainstream media didn’t
show the stream of flag-draped caskets coming off planes or images of bombed
buildings and dead Iraqis. Most Americans, with the exception of military
families, didn’t viscerally feel the war’s impact.” So much of what we see
going on in the world is so removed from us and we feel like we can’t do
anything about it since it is so foreign and disconnected from anything in our
worlds. But it’s extremely connected in that it is affecting human beings, just
like you, and it’s vital to truly get the sense of this human cost and to feel
that even though it may be affecting someone of a different culture, race,
religion, etc, they are all human beings and therefore you are innately
connected, as it is happening to one of your own.
The article went on to give an example of how
to implement this; Nancy Kricorian, who is a CODEPINK activist in NYC, “stood
outside her senator’s office and arranged a row of shoes of all sizes tagged
with the names of Iraqi civilians who had been killed, and asked passersby to
walk in their shoes.” This action got picked up across the country, and now
every Sunday in Santa Monica veterans have set up a field of white crosses
along the beach for each soldier who died. This act of showing the human cost
and making it personal makes the “consequences of inaction far more real and
relevant”
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