I was at a workshop led by Pádraig Ó Tuama today, and he said two paradigm-shifting things I wanted to remember.
One is a personal maxim he tries to live by (pardon the salty language):
Do good.
Don’t be a dick.
Take no shit.
“All three parts are important,” he said. I appreciate the elegance of holding “Don’t be a dick” and “Take no shit” together, because they’re often seen as a zero-sum game. In other words, to be a person who takes no shit, you have to be a dick. Likewise, it’s often thought that if you commit to not being a dick, you’re going to have to take a lot of shit. “Not necessarily,” this maxim says. You can do both.
He also said, “It’s possible to clearly name the harm a person or group is doing without scapegoating them. The refusal to scapegoat someone actually sharpens your critique, rather than diminishing it.”
Again, I noticed a commitment to doing two things that are often thought to be incompatible. In clearly naming injustice, we often resort to scapegoating; likewise the refusal to scapegoat is often conflated with an obfuscation of injustice. Not necessarily, and in fact the refusal to scapegoat strengthens the naming of injustice.
