Living Deliberately: Staying Engaged

Last Friday, my fiancée and I went to a big fireworks show—the kind where people bring their families and set up picnic blankets and lawn chairs in a park four hours before sunset, and vendors sell funnel cake and lemonade, and lots of preteen girls show up in what amounts to little more than denim underwear. It was a fantastic pyrotechnic show and a truly all-American event, complete with this charming tidbit:

COVER BAND FRONT MAN: Yeah, I might have swine flu. It's under control, though. I guess I shouldn't have French-kissed that Mexican guy last night!

And this heartwarming exchange:

My fiancée and I sit down. She puts her arm around my waist.
60-SOMETHING WOMAN: *openly glares at us*
I look up and catch 60-Something Woman glaring at us.
60-SOMETHING WOMAN: *continues openly glaring at us*

This was when I realized that I've been doing a bad job of living deliberately, lately. I'd lost touch with the real world. I developed the idea of living deliberately, and of starting this blog, when I realized that while academic, cultural-studies-influenced activism is necessary, it often fails to have a large impact because it fails to connect with reality. I absolutely want to change the world for the better, and I believe my academic training and self-educated understanding of feminism and other -isms are excellent tools for the job. But it's far too easy to get lost in an activist ivory tower where everyone already understands the basic ideas of feminism, takes for granted that gay and trans people deserve equal rights, and recognizes that climate change is a threat. It's far too easy to preach every sermon to the choir.

To effect real change, it is absolutely essential to connect with the real world. Living deliberately, in a nutshell, means engaging on a daily, local basis with the average people of one's community, working to make the world a better place just by acting deliberately and with integrity.

In the real world, a racist joke might not be okay, but a racist joke couched in a news reference camouflaged as a homophobic joke is hilarious. Two gay twenty-somethings are an obscene spectacle. Strangers and authorities tell women that they do not deserve bodily integrity or autonomy. It's impossible to make responsible decisions at the supermarket because 98% of "eco-friendly" products make misleading claims. Customers prefer white men over any other group for no reason and without even realizing it. Movies, media, and social behaviors reveal that many people of all genders think of men as people and women as...women. In the real world, a mere interest in gender can be a liability—never mind announcing that you believe women (or gay people, or trans people, or Latino people) are actually human. In the real world, gay and trans people go without health care, even when they don't have to, just because they're afraid to come out to their doctors. Going for a swim is an adventure, or a bother, or a danger.

In the real world, it's a victory when people can see we're just people. And it's a deliberate, brazen act of defiance just to be out. Just to do the right thing.