the silenced majority

October Update and Poem Notes:

Hi friends🦋, it has been another few weeks of radio silence for me. Mostly all good reasons for that, though. We’ve been doing some organizing at home, I took an internet hiatus, and I’m making solid progress on my first poetry collection!

It has been recently brought to my attention that I do not ask for what I need, nor share my wins, nearly enough. So, first of all, I want to thank everyone reading this for your incredible support. I am in the ‘baby deer’ stages of becoming a writer/author, so this is when I need encouragement (and a bit of validation) the most. I’m also trying to give myself a bit of grace as I build a foundation as a writer, while navigating having a toddler and rebuilding life around being neurodivergent.

My win for this week is this: I am roughly 70% of the way to completing the first/second draft for my first poetry collection. It will be the first time it is all formatted together in one place, so technically a first draft. But due to being unable to refrain from heavily editing as I go, it will end up closer to a second draft in form. I have a title, but I want to sit on it a little longer to be sure. For now, let’s call this work in progress—"Project Middle”.

If you would like to help me by being a test reader, I would sincerely appreciate it. I'll have a gift for everyone who is helping me through this process with proofing and test reading, but I’m still thinking on what to do there.

Thank you, again, for supporting my journey here. You are all lovely people, and the reason I write.

Today’s poem, "the silenced majority,” has been a month or more in the making. I have written and re-written it, gotten feedback, made a bunch of different arrangements of the words, and listed out numerous variations of what to include in the lighter, center text.

Am I satisfied with this version? Ha, no, not completely. But I ultimately felt that this poem is too relevant to current events for it to end up abandoned in the recesses of my Illustrator files and iPhone photos. So, I am reluctantly opting for ‘good' over ‘better’.

I am the first to admit, and lose sleep over the fact, that this poem is not flawless. It might not be possible for something like this to ever really come close to perfect. One issue I wrestled with is trying to include every targeted and marginalized group that should be included. I'm certain I haven’t though, because I am just one person with a limited perspective. Honestly, I hope you, and others, will tell me if you notice a group seems to be missing so I can consider adding to a future update.

Another issue I struggled with is not being able to cover all variations of preferred identity language for each group. I care a lot about getting this kind of detail right, so it is probably what I stressed over the most. But ultimately, lengthy specificity seemed to overshadow the broader impact of listing all these groups together in one place. I did not want a sense of redundancy to creep in and potentially lose the attention of a reader. I don’t know if I made the right call here; I don’t speak for any of these groups, even those to which I belong. But I do want to apologize to anyone who does not feel correctly represented by the words I chose.

[If you are reading this and thinking I’m being overly self-critical, I would like to gently push back on that. Most of the poetry I write is far more individual to me, and grounded in my own experience. With this poem, I'm trying to speak to the experiences of people at-large. I feel that attempting something like this carries the weight of greater responsibility; if I'm going to go ahead with it, I must set the bar higher than I otherwise would. As I tried to check my biases, blindspots, and misconceptions when writing this, I realized that this idea is simply too big to get completely right in a short time period. So, in admitting where I know this poem comes up short, I intend to make space for thought, conversation, and room to continue growing as we all learn how to better advocate for each other.]

The last area where this poem feels a little incomplete (for me personally, but not to any of my test readers as far as I know), is the wording of the verses. The reason I think it incomplete is that it does not do a great job of conveying how we are to be “united as allies.” The only clues are: (1) all of these groups are suffering in the same ways under the same tiny group of oppressors, and (2) not listening to each other is how we are kept divided. This poem functions like a call-to-action, but there is no direct call-to-action.

I’m happy enough with the first clue, but the second clue falls short of bringing the meaning home. This is because what is meant by ’not listening’ to each other is not clear. We, people in the U.S. specifically, dismiss and under-validate the suffering of groups different from us. We do not believe people when they are trying to sound the alarm about who is mistreating them. We do not see ourselves in their suffering, and so we do not feel called to action.

This is why empathy is so important to democracy, and why the "abusers” in the poem work hard to reframe empathy as something harmful and dangerous. Compassion and empathy are inextricably linked. We can only ever know how our personal experiences make us feel; we cannot step into another person’s body and feel what they feel. But—what we can do—is recognize that we are human, and every other person is human. We can imagine how we might feel if we were experiencing what they are experiencing, and then get a pretty good idea of how they feel. If we would not let ourselves or someone we love suffer without putting up a fight, then we should let our empathy move us to fight for others who are suffering as well.

The next thing I’m going to say is so important, it cannot be understated:

Empathy is only harmful and dangerous to abusers.

A group of people cannot be easily targeted and exploited when many other groups recognize their suffering and stand up to defend them. How does someone recognize another's suffering? By seeing their own suffering and vulnerability in that person's experience. This is the role that empathy plays, and attacking it is how they keep us divided. Abusers do this by exploiting fear and ignorance, doing everything they can to convince us that we should be afraid of people we don’t know because they are 'dangerous/evil/criminal/immoral/etc.' They lie and distort perception to convince us not to trust strangers and neighbors alike. They dehumanize and stigmatize entire groups. They do this because we are less likely to consider a group with empathy if we believe they are a threat to us in some way. They manufacture the “us vs them” dynamic, and hope that we are content to count ourselves lucky that we are not “them.” Once we are bought into this, abusers exploit both groups and distract from that by pitting us against each other.

The grifters, wannabe emperors, and abusers have fifty to sixty percent of the cards right now, and we need to be playing each of our cards together if we want to have a chance.

All that said, this is the call-to-action I intend with this poem: lean into—not away from—empathy. Recognize that we are in serious need of each other’s support. Understand that if one group is vulnerable, we are all vulnerable. Show up not just for your own groups, but for every group that you can: protest together, boycott together, spend money intentionally to support each other, call and write to representatives together, donate when you can, organize neighborhood and community support networks, volunteer, and be a vocal and visible resistance when people are under attack.

This poem, even with compromises, ending up as something very close to my heart. I hope it encourages even just a few more people to take care of each other as we live into the civil rights battles ahead of us. We need each other right now, and we can’t afford to allow any group to lose rights without vocal and visible (and always, always nonviolent) opposition and support.

Drink water, visit a pumpkin patch, and take care of yourselves, too, as we make our way through October. <3

Kerri