There were fans yelling racist insults at our match last week. At a volleyball match. Women speaking out about women's rights are being threatened every day. Because they dared to champion equality. We're constantly losing LGBT youth to suicide. In a world that doesn't accept them they don't know how to accept the world. And I can't understand. I actually cannot understand how people can see the differences in other people as proof of their own superiority. How they can believe that their intolerance leaves them standing on the moral high ground. We can be so much better. That's where this comes from...
Raise Us All
Lower your hands
Your pitchforks, your knives
Step out of the angry mob
Long enough to see the ignorance that begets the hate
To see that you are acting in a false self-defense
That those you wield your weapons against, wield none
Their differences, their choices, their happiness don’t
wound you
The only poison that may threaten you is that of your own
hatred
Lower your hands
And raise your compassion
Lower your voice
And listen
When everyone is yelling, no one can hear
The power of your voice comes not from its volume
Or its ability to inflict pain
But from its ability to inspire another
Shouts and insults are not the tools of inspiration
And you cannot make someone listen if you will not
Lower your voice
And raise your ear
Lower your eyes
Stop looking at everyone else around you
Searching for his sins, his faults, his differences
Look inside yourself instead
Examine your heart and ask yourself
If you like what you find
If you are being the person that you want to be
If the world is better off for your place in it
Lower your eyes
And raise your heart
Lower yourself
Step down off of your pedestal
And stand next to your fellow human beings
No matter their color
Man, woman or other
Whoever they love
None of these things makes them worse or you better
We only find the best of ourselves when we come together
Lower yourself
And raise humanity
When you have lowered your hands, your voice, your eyes,
yourself
And done your best to bring some light into the world
Then—
Raise your hands
To aid the one beside you who has stumbled
Raise your voice
In the service of another’s cause
Raise your eyes
And look for the beauty around you
Raise yourself
And it will raise us all
