Green Shoots: You’re not a stone – you can change

Moving house forces you to clear out the junk you’ve been hoarding for decades. I came across a journal I kept in 1997. My colleagues had paid for a ticket for my new wife to join me in Ireland after I had finished a three-week business trip to Austria and England. As I read the reflections of my twenty something self, I cringed at some of the crap that occupied my thoughts back then. But I was also able to think about how we evolve as humans. I remember someone saying, ‘You’re not a stone, you can change’.

Our world is changing so fast it makes a thinking person’s head spin. It’s hard enough keeping up with factual information that should shape one's thinking. We also have to deal with fake news and the incessant repetition of falsehoods by manipulative politicians and billionaires until the public start believing them to be the truth. And boy is there a never- ending torrent of information to process.

I am grateful for having been exposed to information about life and our coexistence as species on this earth. You wouldn’t believe it, but at one point in my life I was a homophobe. It took an evening of deep conversation with a certain Barney Beck that started me on the path to change. He helped a young and naïve me to learn about the inherent dignity that is present in everyone, regardless of station in life. And frankly, who made other people’s sexuality my business?

I was also quite sexist, I think. Some of my journal entries used pretty objectifying language to describe women. It’s cringeworthy to read that stuff now. A lifetime of engagement since then with so many feminists, activists, and plain decent humans has certainly allowed me to find a more dignified way of relating to people.

You may also not believe that I had dreams of being really rich, although the aspirations to a 3-litre V6 Ford Cortina might give the lie to that. I did want the nice things in life, and early on in my activism would often bunk organisational meetings to drink wine, eat pizza, and talk philosophical shite with my boujie friends at university.

But in revisiting this old journal, I was happy to see that my general ideological outlook even then was – dare I say it - progressive. I mused about post-cold war Europe and “how the East Europeans, who by and large have a strong church theology and embrace neo- liberalism – probably as a reaction to communism, will cope with integration into the EU.”

And then in discussions on reconciliation and impunity, particularly in the context of our TRC, I bemoaned the preoccupation with “technical and legal measures rather than political and human responses” to historical human rights abuses. In my work encounters, my assessment of the people I met was rooted in whether they were good for the socialist revolution or not. A bit simplistic, sure, but I’m quite happy that I’ve been able to keep the principles of justice, human rights, and dignity as key aspects of who I am, even as I’ve embraced the need to change other parts of me.

It was John Patterson who said “Only fools and dead men don’t change their minds. Fools won’t, and dead men can't .” We must be careful how we navigate this world and its demands. We must also embrace the principles that make us who we are. But when those beliefs marginalise others or foster injustice, then we cannot dig in our heels and resist change. We must be open to new experiences that may change what we believe. After all,

we are not stones, and I certainly am neither a fool nor dead.