May

“Thank you for showing me that bending backwards for someone isn’t always enough to keep them around, and that people will leave if that’s what they want, no matter what you do.”
― Paolo Cruz

“Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes.
Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins.
And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“Yet as quickly as it comes, the fire is gone, replaced by a smoldering pile of embers. Much like our brief time on this earth -a flash of light, an opportunity for great good, immense evil, or worse, selfish nothingness. And just like that, our light too, for better or worse, goes out.

The monk leans close, whispering to the flame with gentle breaths, coaxing the sparks to live again. A small finger of fire takes hold on the moss bed. Rebirth. Renewal. The light begins again, feeble but growing. It knows nothing else, only the perpetual act of pressing back against the darkness. That is its only purpose. It knows not of the endless cold in which it exists and will never overcome.”
― Gareth Worthington, In The Shadow Of A Valiant Moon

“Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World