The State of Diversity Address
It seems like it's been about a year since Bryan set this up for me. Thank you Bryan! All I had was/is the concept: anordinarymystic. I live in an existential universe. Anyhow, it's been a great gift. I'm still unwrapping it and finding my way into it. It's been a place to reveal myself and explore my thoughts. For a while I wandered around the abyss looking for meaning and leaving a trail of words, until they collapsed under their own weight and became indistinguishable from the chaos around them. The experience has taught me that diversity is an essential condition of life.
One great thing about this medium is that it is an undefined reality, a digital frontier that both emerges and recedes with each bit of data. It is a quantum reality where cause does not necessarily precede effect and explanations are not necessarily linear. I know from exerting myself upon the ether, insinuating myself into the Internet, that reality is by nature diverse and that realities that are less diverse, are less likely to sustain life as abundantly as more diverse realities. In other words, I believe that diversity functions as a measure of an environment's ability to sustain itself.
Therefore, this being the arbitrary anniversary of anordinarymystic.com, it seems only fitting to offer the following State of Diversity Address. And the state of diversity from this perspective is hostage.
Diversity is hostage to the politics of identity, the politics of color, the politics of gender, the politics of ability, the politics of age. Diversity is drawn and quartered daily by an unruly mob of past injustices, of wounds and hurts so painful and so private that we cannot look at the man behind the curtain with his hand up our skirts, down our pants, on our backs, picking our pockets, stealing our dreams with candied celebrations, trinkets and baubles, brighter shiner newer, prettier glorifications of the examples we make exceptions when we hold them out for hope. But color is not cash, and race is not reparations. We are not race, we are not gender, we are not ability or age, we are, we the people, all the people, all the time and only those labels when we offer or accept anything less.