Folks I feel strongly about this one. I’m about to come on strong. You ready for some strong? I’m feeling strongly.

I do this values sort exercise with everyone I can. All the time. Ask anyone who hangs around me and they’ll tell you, I’m basically a one-trick-pony at this point in my life. I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat or a Solarpunk Revolutionary. I want to know your values and I want you to be more in tune with them, allowing them to affect your choices and behaviors.

And sometimes, people find certain cards objectively objectionable based on their worldview(s). Some folks do not care for this card. They toss it to the side without a second thought. I like to gently push back when that happens. Not to force a value on them, but to challenge a flippant dismissal.

It’s true the term “Social Justice” has a certain political bent today. Say it out loud and you immediately get a response, sometimes positive… and sometimes not.

Many people feel like the idea of social justice has been weaponized by the left-er side of the spectrum. They might feel like social justice speaks to a particular ideology they may not agree with, or it might speak to government-run community welfare programs that they believe are either mismanaged or morally in error.

In my last essay I pushed back against the little description on the bottom of the card. In this case I lean all the way in.

correcting injustice, care for the weak

Who among us could fault the correction of injustices in this world? And there are so many to go around, right? Who among us could balk at caring for the weak? I sincerely hope the answer is none! None among us. Breathe deep.

I’ll say this for myself and definitively: It’s a joy and an honor to defend the defenseless, feed the hungry, to clothe the naked. To care for the weaker ones among us—regardless of the source of their weakness.

The thing is, most people, when pressed, do agree that injustice should be corrected. That the weak should be cared for. And so it becomes a conversation about degrees.

Exactly how weak does one need to be in order to be worthy of our help? And how gross must the injustice be for us to act? And precisely how much help do we render to the lost soul who’s been found in true need?

I was born into a set of ideas that lauded these concepts of caring for the weak and correcting injustice… in theory. When the rubber met the road we bristled at the practice.

And friends, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve changed my position. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking of my self as a social justice warrior. But I think I kind of want to.

In my youth I saw a value for social justice as a weak position that made allowances for perceived inadequacies or faults. But now I see that it’s a position of strength. The people I admire most are those who live from a place of service. But you already knew that.

I cannot tell stories from my own life without being self aggrandizing. I cannot “prove my point” here, and tell you the ways I’m trying to scoot over and make room on the bench. All I can say is that it’s a heart position, and it’s a joyful discipline, (but a discipline for sure), for me.

Because my baser instincts are generally toward self preservation. My baser instincts would step on you in order to save me. I see it in myself, I recognize the ugliness that I bear. In the old days I would have called it a “sin nature”. And now I see it as a fear response.

I’m afraid I won’t have enough. So I don’t live my life in a way that makes certain that others do. I’m afraid that I won’t be good enough, or accepted for who and what I am, for how I am, and so I will step on you to get up a little higher out of the fray. And the decision toward justice on a societal level is a series of choices. It’s about seeing and believing that I am enough. I have enough to share. I can give freely and not be worried that I will be left with nothing. I can feel assured that we are in this together and that in the areas where I’m the weaker one, that you will be there to love me and fill in my gaps.

Important in this conversation, (and probably what separates me from being a true SJW), is that I must contextualize my actions and behaviors, and by that I mean that I must personally approach my life as a series of concentric circles with myself in the center.

I must care for myself and my own health, my physical body and my brains, my spirit and my guts, I must care for these things because I have a second circle that’s important to me—my family. I need to care for me so I can care for them.

And there’s a third circle! My friends, my closest people. The people who come in my home and eat my food and ask to do the values thing over and over. And there’s a fourth circle, and a fifth and a sixth, and more.

You’re somewhere in those circles. My parents, my old heroes, my customers and employees, the mayor, high school thespians, the person living under the bridge in my hometown—they’re all in those circles. And it’s tempting to see this as a situation of running out or of having some leftover. But I believe the opposite to be true. I’m observing the opposite to be true in my life.

The healthier I am, the more justice is served in my own life, (by that I mean the more I demand that I walk justly and be a source of just behaviors in the world), the more I have for my family. For that second circle.

The more I’m able to influence and lead my family into places of unselfishness, the more we have to give to that third circle. And so on. And so on.

It’s not about leftovers, it’s about overflow.

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