Skip to main content

The Invisible

"Of all the world's errors...the most fundamental [is] the 'erasing' of people, the 'hiding away' of suffering."

One of the ideas I was exposed to in a junior high leadership camp I attended last summer was the notion that there are invisible students. These students, it was implied, needed to be included, made visible. On reflection, there were definitely students this last year at school who fit that idea.

This issue reaches beyond school, though. I got the quote above from Mountains Beyond Mountains, which covers the efforts of one man to end TB in Haiti and elsewhere. The problem of invisibility is pandemic, and like other diseases, there are different varieties.

The first is voluntary invisibility: a person chooses not to stand out in any way, and in fact tries to hide when confronted with the option to stand out, because-- among other reasons-- he or she fears being judged by peers or wants to avoid failure. This involves a need to be self-actualized, a need to reach one's potential. Without a satisfactory view of self, this person chooses not to be known by others.

The second form is involuntary invisibility: a person is made invisible by others. This takes place because those others want to remain unaware of the suffering that these individuals face, because those others have a purpose the attainment of which does not require them, or because those others feel the individuals to be generally unimportant (I'm sure there are other reasons).

Making people visible takes a commitment to invest in someone; a strong set of boundaries; and a clear, refined purpose. It could involve encouraging someone to find his or her niche, helping someone see his or her potential through tutoring, or especially making someone aware of his or her inherent value as a person. The venue to make someone visible can be one of many: a school, a court, a park, your workplace, another country, a nonprofit or government agency, or your home.

You would think that making others visible involves allowing yourself to become invisible. Nothing could be further from the truth, only your audience may not be the one you'd expected.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Nice Guy Fallacy

I read part of a poem recently by one of my favorite poets. It reads: I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage The linnet born within the cage That never knew the summer woods. I envy not the beast that takes His license in the field of time Unfetter'd by the sense of crime To whom a conscience never wakes. Nor what may call itself as bles't The heart that never plighted troth But stagnates in the weeds of sloth Nor any want-begotten rest. I hold it true, whate'er befall I feel it, when I sorrow most 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. At base, Tennyson contrasted a life of risk, and consequent pain, with one of security. He sides conclusively with the life of risk, and says he fails to envy those who have faced no hardship. I agree with him; and, for good or ill, his words are just as relevant today as they were in the nineteenth century. Like then, there are those today who choose to live their lives with as little risk as...
2 comments
Read more

Persuasion

At different points in history, governments have devoted men, women, and resources to try to persuade others to their side. One significant example of this occurred in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Hitler knew how important it was to make sure the German people were on his side as leader of the country. One way he did this was by controlling what people heard. Specifically, near the beginning of World War II, Hitler made it a crime for anyone in Germany to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. These were called the “extraordinary radio measures.” He did this to ensure that Germans weren’t being persuaded by enemy countries to question their loyalty to Hitler. He knew that a German listening to a radio broadcast from Britain might persuade that German to believe that Great Britain was the good guy and Hitler the bad guy. This was so important, in fact, that two people in Germany were actually executed because they had either listened to or planned to listen to a foreign radio broadcast (one...
Post a Comment
Read more

Experiment

My social studies students and I are studying Islam right now. The other day, we were reading about one of the Five Pillars, zakat (charity in Islam that means "that which purifies"). Muslims believe that giving away money helps to purify it and also "safeguards [them] against miserliness" (1). I asked the class if this was true, that giving money away makes us less greedy. They generally agreed that it does. I wanted to test whether or not they really believed this, so I handed a volunteer a $10 bill. I told the class that I would ask for the bill back the next day. I said that they should pass the bill around among their classmates, and that as a result, there would be no way for me to know who had the bill. For that reason, whoever wanted to keep the money could keep it. Even if I did learn who kept it, I told them, I would not punish that person. I wanted them to be motivated by their own honesty. The next day, I asked for the bill, and a student handed it to me...
Post a Comment
Read more