The most direct, effective, and sustainable means Of creating diversity, equity, and inclusion in any community or institution Is to treat everyone with the same fundamental level of respect, dignity, compassion, and curiosity. How this occurs is through navigating a consent process that is direct, dynamic, affirmative, active, and mutual. Anything less is the expression or creation of cultural scar tissue.

“Sometimes, like Thanksgiving, I miss the people that have inhabited my past like nothing else in the world. But the past is a country that we will never visit again. Get letters occasionally, yes!….scrapbooks, photographs, and tall tales. To the future, we are foreigners that do not yet speak the language. It is ours to create (and be created) from the present in which we live. The balance lies not in the polarity of the external dialogue, but in having the internal buoyancy of gratitude outweigh the lump of sorrow for the lives gone from ours.

It doesn’t interest me what you believe in(*). I want to know how you behave when the principles you profess are deeply challenged. I want to know what gives you deeper insight into how to improve the condition of your life and the lives of all those in your care. …

Tiptoeing through the triggers of a moral minefield. We have gone from “manufacturing consent” to “manufacturing outrage”. Someone blew out the gaslight and left the gas on full blast. Spark an illuminating question at your own risk.

I am wary of any religious, social, or political movement that employs “Original Sin” as a central tenet. Too often, the price of “Atonement” becomes the consolidation of someone else’s power. Any resistance to the movement is taken as evidence for the pernicious “Sin” that must be eradicated. Even if it is at the cost of someone’s social, political, financial, or corporeal life. In this way, the movement produces tyrants of the type that are indistinguishable from those that the movement originally sought to depose.

We are bearing witness to an auto-immune disorder of the individual, communal, and cultural body. This is brought about by having a steady diet of contradictory messages injected into the ecosystems of our bodies, minds, and cultural norms. The underlying narratives of these “messages” are not, as they may claim, in service of our health and well-being. Rather they are in service of the very medium in which they are transmitted.

Condemning the Trumps(*) of the world For all of the world’s problems Is like shooting fish in a barrel: The gleeful and temporary satisfaction Generated by unleashing our outrage At a dehumanized projection of our fears Distracts us from who sold us the story Bringing us and the fish to the barrel And the absurdity of fishing with a gun. (*)Trumps, Anti-Trumps, and all of their supporters.

I have never met an ideology that didn’t want to be an apex predator in a narrative ecosystem.

No human being deserves less than a fundamental threshold of Respect, Dignity, Compassion, and Curiosity. The kicker is that no one inherently deserves Any more than this threshold. Our persistent experience of these qualities, Above or below this threshold, Is bounded not by the greatest of our deeds, But by the least of how we treat one another. It follows that, By aspiring and delivering, Consistently and collectively, Far and above this threshold, We raise the bar.