Written by Rachelle Sartori, Community Engagement Coordinator, Montana No Kid Hungry
For thousands of families across Montana, finding even five minutes to stop, be still, and breathe is a close to impossible feat. Parents are juggling working while homeschooling. Children face sadness and isolation as they wonder when life will return to some form of normalcy. Teachers, business owners, and nonprofit leaders contemplate whether the job they signed up for will ever be the same again.
In these tumultuous times, it feels tempting to seek an explanation or a culprit to blame for why we have all faced so much suffering and heartache. When we fear for our own stability, safety, and livelihoods, we seek to find who we believe is taking it away. We see stories in the media and hear dialogue in our communities that points fingers at people of different races and social classes for causing the destruction. We hear rhetoric that says that Black and Indigenous people endanger our communities, that tax dollars are wasted by low income people accessing public assistance, and that immigrants and refugees are taking our jobs away.
However, a new day is dawning where we must look around us and see that we are not the problem, but rather the solution. We must believe that shaming and blaming one another has kept us divided long enough, and that when we get into step with one another we become a powerful force to reckon with – a force that has the autonomy to meet our own needs and the needs of each other, while building sustainable communities that recognize all of us as valuable.
Image from: https://justseeds.org/graphic/getting-into-step-1968/