One of my fb “friends” recommended this video. I watched it, following this beautiful little survivor’s moving story until the end, when I sensed it turn false, as if someone had put her up to it.
“Be the change you wish to see.”
“What are you waiting for.”
Unfortunately, these two exhorations are so common now as memes, that the meaning has been sucked out of them.
In order to transform our world from violence to peace, we must first re-imagine it. And to do that we simply must keep on re-inventing our language, lest both what we seek to convey and our longing to connect get continuously torqued and de-animated into sound bites.
How do you disarm the oppressor? By staying one step ahead — where he cannot (yet) go because he doesn’t recognize where you’ve gone. Of course, he will find out and, scramble to catch up. But by that time, we will have already leapfrogged ahead, blythe spirits all, our continuous transformation of language coding a continuously regenerating world.
1 thought on ““Kaelynn’s story,” real? Or pretended. Not the story itself, but the way it’s told.”
Yes, this is moving and yet I couldn’t help feel that the sheer horror of what she experienced and described was somehow marginalized by the way the video clip ended. I feel a bit manipulated by this; like the person standing on the street corner with a sign that says, “I am an out of work mother of 2 and live in my car, any help appreciated”…and then closing with something like a quote from the Bible or “God Bless you.” Then you discover that this is all a ruse, that these signs are meant to tug at your heart strings and you will then part with your money, but that there is no mother living in the car with 2 children, and the money you give them is not used to buy food. This left me feeling the same way. How different is that to some of the tactics that we hear from the movies or Wall Street? Anyway, I find myself a little disgusted right now.