Re-membering: Our Shared Humanity...

June has offered many opportunities for reflection on our humanity.

It’s Indigenous Peoples Month and Pride Month/the start of Pride Season.

June 19 was Juneteenth in the USA

June 20th was World Refugee Day

June 21st was National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada.

In the week ahead, Canada will have a National Day of Remembrance of Victims of Terrorism (June 23), Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day (June 24) and Canadian Multiculturalism Day (June 27).

And this is just June. In today’s world, we have these days, weeks and months of recognition all year round.

To many, these are a dizzying number of commemorations and celebrations as all these important human recognitions vie for our collective attention. It’s becoming easier and easier to succumb to compassion fatigue, emotional numbness and saturation, and to veer towards desensitization. Economic pressures and affordability also have Canadians looking inward and away from the ‘other.’ For example, while research doesn’t quite name Canada anti-immigrant, it does point to a change in the Canadian public sentiment for the first time in decades to a concern for the number of newcomers, for reasons such as the housing crises. What do we do? How do we balance all the interests and concerns? How do we keep track of it all? So what? Now what?

As a national and global community, we must recognize that the questions and issues before us, the reasons we have so many days of remembrance and recognition, are representative of the work we need to do to more deeply recognize and uplift our shared humanity, our collective thriving and our planetary health. We cannot afford to bury our heads in the sand, because these recognitions invite us to reflect and reconnect to each other—to remember that we are a global family who need each other in these times and must find solutions for all our concerns. We must remember, that our humanity calls us to be part of acknowledging and healing our self-inflicted wounds, engage in the systemic social change work needed to ensure we do not repeat past harms and work together for a better future. These remembrances call us to be human together with members of our community—real people who work, live and play beside us and for whom, our attention to the work of redesigning a better world that welcomes and works for all is non-negotiable and urgent....see full post here...