If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
Interpretation
To create a better society, start by uplifting those who are most disadvantaged.
Adrienne Rich highlights the importance of prioritizing the needs of the most marginalized individuals within a society in order to foster real change. By focusing on empowering the powerless, we can establish a foundation for a more dignified and hopeful community, emphasizing the need to build societal structures from the grassroots level.
In practice
During a speech about social reform, this quote can inspire leaders to focus on community empowerment.
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
I believe that the rights of women and girls is the unfinished business of the 21st century.
Our scientists grapple with the difficulties of placing a man on the moon, but the immediately troubling concern of our society is whether men of different races can sit together at a lunch counter.
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
There is no debate about whether or not climate change is happening. We will deal with it as a challenge. But we also take it as an opportunity to invest.
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