The Human Family Tree

I see you, I hear you.
photo source: Unsplash
Photographer credit: Luis Morera

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's was the beginning of  change that was needed, both then and now. This was a movement led to a large extent by the GI Generation and Silent Generation, as they mentored Boomers in their youth about nonviolence. C.T. Vivian of the GI Generation, who we just recently lost, was a minister, activist, and author, an MLK aid who shed his own blood on the front lines of the 60's Civil Rights Movement and helped create a culture of moral leadership. John Lewis, of the Silent Generation, who also just passed away, was often called the Conscience of America. Both of these men continued leading with love as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, just before they left this world. Gen Xers read about the Civil Rights Movement in our history books and learned first hand stories from the parents and grandparents. Some first wave Gen Xers witnessed these protests on the streets as toddlers in strollers. Like the civil rights work of the 1960's, the BLM movement points out systematic and institutional injustice, and just like the 1960's, it is still hard to speak truth to power.  

Say Their Names
Photo source: Unsplash
Photographer credit: Clay Banks 

As statues get torn down, along with the oppressive systems they represent and as protests happen in the streets, it is also a time for us to silently search our own hearts, to look at ways we've been conditioned, and to learn better ways as we move forward. Of the most racist people I've known personally, I am no longer in contact, or I keep quite a distance, but I can say they were people who ultimately hated themselves. I wonder if these people had been taught to love themselves if they would have hated others less. When humans have been taught to believe their race is better than another, the problems of history have begun. When people are conditioned to believe another race or ethnicity is inherently "bad," they can justify doing terrible things to them. All humans are 99.9% identical in their genetics. The idea of 'race' was a fabricated concept from very recent history on the timeline of human history. As more and more people get their DNA tested these days, we discover within our own ancestry that the lines of the borders of countries blur and that the very ethnicities some of us had been taught to fear actually are within us. Science traces DNA to a 'Mitochondrial Eve' and you and I have a DNA match to a woman in Africa many generations ago. She is a grandmother to us all. Certain theories say everyone on earth alive today is at most a 50th cousin to anyone else. Other theories say we are at most a 10th cousin to anyone else on the planet. As the family tree of all humanity is built, Gen Xer A.J. Jacobs writes, "Human beings are biased to treat family members with more consideration...By revealing the cliché of "We're all one big family" is true, we hope to provide bad news to bigots who will have to face the important fact that they are related to whatever ethnic group they despise..." 

photo source: Unsplash
photographer credit: Jon Tyson 

If we had any idea how closely related we are to the person behind us in line at the grocery store, to the person on the street corner, or to the person holding up a sign with words we might or might not agree with, biology shows us what was theorized for a long time before there was evidence for it: everyone is related to everyone on the planet. 

As we witness angry conversations happening online and people yelling from their cars at people holding up poster boards, the response is often "all lives matter." Black Lives Matter doesn't mean other lives don't matter, it means they also matter, and for far too long, Black lives have been most vulnerable. 

photo source: Unsplash
Photographer credit: Nathan Dumlao

As the idea of everyone having an equal place in the human family spreads, I'd like to think of the Gen Xers of today, a little older and wiser now, as the mentors in this era, and the Millennials and Gen Z learning from us just as various socially conscious Boomers learned from the Silent Generation and the GIs. Of the founders of the BLM movement, Alicia Garza (b. 1981) is a Gen Xer, Patrice Cullors (b. 1983) and Opal Tometi (b. 1984) are Millennials. One of the defining principles of BLM is intergenerationality - generations coming together to collaborate and mentor from wisdom and experience.  

 "When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression, and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and power of everlasting love be your guide." 

-John Lewis 

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Gen Xer Don Lemon's podcast: Silence is not an Option

 

Remembering C.T. Vivian (1924-2020) of the GI Generation,

and John Lewis (1940-2020) of the Silent Generation  

Memory Eternal 

 (c) 2020 writing by Chloe Koffas 2020, all rights reserved  

sources: 

Wikipedia

Common Dreams

A Family Tree of the Entire Human Race - A.J. Jacobs 

How Mitochondrial Eve Connected All Humanity...

ONE Campaign

ONE is a global campaign that is both nonpartisan and non-profit. The focus is to end extreme poverty and preventable disease so that human beings everywhere may experience a life of dignity and opportunity. It's a shift in thinking beyond charity, it's about creating justice and equality. Whether it's lobbying political leaders or running grassroots campaigns, ONE steps up to have conversations with governments in different parts of the world to empower millions of lives.

Members of ONE include writers, artists, faith and business leaders, healthcare professionals and scientists. It was co-founded by Bono and includes people of every culture and generation. 

If there ever was a time when world leaders needed to come together to come up with a unified plan for solving something, it is now. Defeating the COVID-19 pandemic will take every one of us. There is currently a petition on the one.org website that you can sign to urge world leaders to come up with a global pandemic response plan: one world petition

(c) 2020  image credit: ONE Campaign 

Food and Water (and setting up a system for giving)

While Generation X is the generation that gives the most to charities and is very big on volunteer work, as I talk to busy Gen Xers, I often hear them say they wish they could do more to help our communities and beyond. Many of us want to be more charitable with time and resources, but in the rush of daily life, work, kids, and responsibilities, it can get moved to the back-burner. My solution for this is sorting out a couple of quick logistics. 

Here are two key ideas: having a place, and having a system.

Let's say you want to give to a food bank, and you set food aside to do this, but by the time you finally have time to drop it off, the food is already expired so you have to throw it away. Coming up with a system in your home can solve this. You can usually do this in 30 minutes or less. Maybe you have a retired neighbor who sees a friend once a month who volunteers at a food bank. Knowing you are not usually going to have time to drive 20 minutes to do a food bank delivery, you could put it on your calendar to drop off food to that neighbor's porch every month on a certain day. Having a specific place in your house to set the food aside you want to give means it doesn't just get mixed back in with the other food in your pantry.



My family and I wanted to help villages in third world countries get accessible wells. Westgate Church in San Jose, CA takes plastic recyclable plastic bottles and aluminum cans, uses the volunteer work of its members to process everything, and donates the money. Since this began in 2013, there are 37,000 people in 16 countries who now have access to clean water who previously did not.

Here's what we did on our end:
We put a separate recycle bin just for cans right next to our regular recycle bin. We put a big label on it so that down the road it doesn't accidentally get moved or used for something else. We set up a system where we crush the cans about once a week or so. We have a larger bin in the garage that holds the crushed cans. Both of these bins created a specific place in our house so that this could work, and by thinking it through, we now have a system - the bin in the garage is right next to the car and even right next to where we store bags, so we can easily pull it all together and drop it off when it is convenient.

If you want to give but you don't know what charity would most help people, here are two simple, practical ideas for you: just think of food and water.

Water: by helping villages in third world countries get wells, this solves all kinds of problems. Other than having water to drink, and for health, it also means they can water crops and grow food. This can mean that less people have to leave a village to go to a faraway city to be breadwinners so families can stay together, and the list goes on. Having clean water helps protect human rights; it creates a way for a community to thrive. World Vision has brought clean water to thousands of villages:

World Vision

Food:  One out of six Americans go hungry. If you've ever experienced any amount of time going hungry, it is unbelievably hard to make it through the day. Life is hard enough, and being hungry makes it hard to concentrate in school or at work. When fresh garden food goes in the trash, it's because people, who would actually like to give it away, don't have a way (a system) to do this. Ample Harvest helps connect gardeners to food pantries:

Ample Harvest web site

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(c) 2020 writing and photo by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved