Life prompts us to action when it hits close to home. With Netflix and Youtube fiction, we get so transported, our neighborhoods feel like miles away when they are right there next to us. With social media, we can get so fixated on what our family and close friends are doing, we can shield ourselves from that neighbor right around the corner.
I was and still am in many ways an overprotected housebody who cried deeply at Hotel Rwanda when I was fourteen because of the atrocity. I thought to myself, “I can’t stand this, how can people be so evil to their neighbor.” Then I was consoled by my mom, started studying high school science and watched youtube comedy to console myself after (and other internet browsing that dehumanizes people actually). All the while I didn’t do much more to learn about or effect change in that area of the world (or my neighborhood for that matter). The closest thing for me up to that point of doing something to step into making a change was writing letters to the then president Bush and Osama Bin Laden and other world leaders to think about their families before killing other children like me… But I didn’t even write those letters. The wishful beliefs kept inside.
Aside from face book comments and spotty donations to causes, my best effort to improve mankind was having multicultural friends, making posts about character, reading the bible and being a good boy. All very in-home. Loving my neighbor as myself I didn’t think required me to leave the walls of my house. If my name was Jon Q New Yorker, or Jon Bisangwa, those events would’ve hit much closer to home. But my name is Jon Laski. I am a white, Californian middle aged male Christian who considered himself moral and somewhat woke after reading Peggy McIntosh’s work in college. But then what felt like the 9/11 of race happened when George Floyd was murdered. Much like that 9/11, I heard it and thought, “another incident. God this world is hard.” Then my best friend, a Nigerian bloke with a gold heart spoke out to me in a blog. “What if I was in his place!”
My eyes got really big, the room’s dimensions pushed out a bit and I realized; this crisis wasn’t in 1994 or on the East Coast, this is in my backyard and could happen to my best friend much more likely than to me. Pain finally hit close enough to home to prompt me to action. I started a zoom group, made some wristbands and donated to charity, x,y,z. Not much but at least the dial moved. My heart and my purpose are now fully behind learning about justice, fairness and shalom. Shalom is Hebrew for the belief that peace in society is like a garment with peoples woven and working together. The more I pursue that, the more I become a neighbor I’d want to have and I feel more Christian than privileged.
In conclusion, let me ask this. What kind of neighbor would you want to have, if you were Black? Now go, be that neighbor.
By Jon Laski, Core Team
