We are humans. This is a safe generalization if you can read and you are not artificial intelligence. If you are the latter please feel free to disregard this post. If you are human - welcome!
The notion of being great is not a verifiable truth. Great is a response when something good happens. There are many who have achieved what I could never dream of achieving. Thank you to those that have.
For everyone else, whatever your particular skill or discipline or talent, I thank you for making the world a better place - that is if your skill doesn't hurt anyone unnecessarily for no good reason.
If you are a dentist, a surgeon or a nurse, some things must hurt before they are healed.
The kind of hurting that has no healing in it, is bullying, judging, labelling, putting people in boxes, insulting, threatening - usually has no value and is usually a habit learned from systems designed to take away the dignity of some, for the sake of profit for a minority.
Yes of course arresting someone who is a threat to the innocent, hurts someone. It takes a lot of training and humility to work in any capacity that wields power over others for the greater good.
All powers come with responsibility and there are many regrets I had for hurting others, when I had the power to do so. I am not great.
It's really okay to not be great. It's okay to not win, to be wrong sometimes, to make mistakes.
I remember when I started work at 16, the man who gave me lifts to and from the office, once said that I was attractive. And I replied, thank you, but I'm not a stunning beauty!!
Where on earth did I get the idea that I should be? Who in my family said I should be a movie star or beauty queen?
No-one personally but the messages I absorbed so gullibly from television sit coms and commercials and fashion outlets and make-up counters at the drug store, was that I should try harder. Some memes even promised that I would turn heads if I used their products. Although I knew these commercial promises were not to be believed, I didn't understand how they collectively formed my values.
All this proves that I was gullible, and that there were few opportunities to challenge these powerful messages, for a 16 year old.
I write this to say the notion of greatness, the idea that we should be better than everyone else, not just to strive, is dangerous. This is how we create the kind of society that alienates us, that enables structural violence like homelessness, poverty, alienation, that makes us complicit in bigotry and racism.
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