Builders

Litany Esguerra

6/23/2018

Title: Builders

For most of this week, I attended the annual conference of the National Disability Rights Network. Over 500 people attended in Baltimore, Maryland from almost every state in the network. There, I helped monitor sessions or attended a few myself and I really enjoyed the magnitude of learning and community within this conference.

One of my favorite sessions was a general session on community living and integration. The theme of this talked about the history of people with disabilities in asylums and institutions and the monumental steps it took to live in the community. It required not only a Supreme Court ruling and state implementation of these plans, but also, a change the way people thought about institutionalization. From one of the guest speakers in this session, I was struck by their poignant statement: “The mind is the builder.” I was reminded that the mind is what can create or demolish barriers, whether it is towards other people or towards oneself. It applied well to the theme of the session but also held true to our society at-large. Attitudes, mindsets, and beliefs are the very things in our minds that can either lead to change or get in the way of it. It can lower expectations within society and promote stereotypes that make it difficult to do anything different. However, "the mind is the builder" in the way that we can also rebuild our expectations, and ultimately, our actions. How can we rebuild our minds to create change? How can we rebuild the attitudes that we have towards things we might disagree with? How can we create high expectations for ourselves and for others so that we may begin to do something different? We start with rebuilding our minds and then move forward from there.

Learn, evaluate, and change. This, I believe, is the nature of social justice. I’m not sure how to answer the questions above except to look at how I have tried to rebuild my mind, and it is still a continuous process. I have to evaluate myself and look at how I look at others. For example, I remember when I was challenged to do this when I started taking classes in my disability and human development minor. One of my favorite courses was on disability and American film and the media because it pointed out many ways in which society portrays people with disabilities and how they perceive this population. I was challenged to rebuild my mind around this coursework because it was relevant in many of the movies and TV shows I watched in and outside of the class. I still try to be cognizant and even critical (at times) to how others are being portrayed in the media. Who is the writer? Who is trying to rebuild our minds? It’s amazing how this connects to social justice work. We need to understand this in other facets of society. As United Methodists, we can be builders and rebuilders through social justice.

When I first applied for this program, we were asked to define social justice. I stated that social justice as a “process of recognizing the need for change and then committing to creating the change. It is a way to understand what is wrong in our world and then acting against these inequalities.” I think this definition still holds true from before. This week, I expanded my insight on this definition through the notion of rebuilding the mind as a way of recognizing the need for change. I hope I can find ways to expand and apply other parts of the definition in my upcoming work.