A Tale Across Time
Yesterday in an adorable bookshop in central New York, I looked through their over-priced sticker selection. I’m a sucker for a good sticker and shopkeepers see me coming. Often these tiny statements capture a truth that is surprising or even profound. Can a small sticky paper actually promote thoughtful consideration?
They make me think. They make me smile. They remind me of things I value. So, maybe they can do that for someone else, too.
As I was spinning the display around enjoying the options, a couple of the stickers grabbed me. One in particular, I photographed so I could share it here. It says, “They knew I’d be too powerful if I could do math.”
For centuries only those in leadership and control (think government, church hierarchy, and the rich) received education and learned to read. They knew the power that comes by denying the same opportunities for learning and growth to the masses. They say “ignorance is bliss”, but in actuality, it’s often a tool of oppression. And people in large numbers are content to let others do the learning, thinking, decision making, planning, and leading. Heck, it keeps us from having to do the hard work and having to make crucial decisions for ourselves. But, blissful ignorance comes at a price.
This same denial of opportunity, education, and exposure has happened across all the world, often under the guise that the crowds of people can’t handle the big truths—that women can’t deal with big emotions, people of color can’t learn difficult information, that native peoples are more primitive in their practices so they can be dismissed. Basically, anyone who might be a threat to those in power (typically older, white men) should be provided less information, education, opportunities to develop skills and understanding.
People kept in the dark don’t know what they don’t know. And, that advantages some over others, doesn’t it? It gives those in power the incentive to rig societal systems to favor some and not others.
But here’s the thing. Those who catch on and wisely size-up the truth about the power and control game, understand that the messages offered to hold people back or down, are entirely false. Not only are others capable, but they may have far greater potential than those who are struggling to stay in control.. Those formerly overlooked CAN think critically. learn anything, write stories and poems, create art, play new songs, and use whatever gifts they have to shift the balance of things. Only then can we move toward an educated, wise, incredibly skilled population of people that includes ALL of us.
It’s already happening. One well-known example is seen in the movie Hidden Figures, which tells the story of an intelligent and resourecful woman named Katherine Johnson. She happens to be a woman of color who changed history, saving the lives of astronauts hoping to return from space whose odds were pretty awful. She, no doubt, saved future programs at NASA. Someone invested in and taught her. And, she GOT IT! She internalized what she learned, and math became an intricate puzzle that she plowed through to find answers, becoming a mathematical genius. She found answers others couldn’t get—that men on the job couldn’t get.
This is not new. Capable people and their stories have been swept under the rug across centuries and millennia.
Who wants to be outdone by other brilliant capable persons? And, if those others are taught—the women, underprivileged, native Americans, black individuals from all parts of the world—they just might become knowledgable and skilled and powerful! Powerful enough to unseat the ones who have worked so hard keep the balance in their favor.
So, whoever you are, soak up the math! Learn the science, history, languages, art, music. Whatever makes you hum inside. Look for opportunities to grow and do what you are good at and love. Bring it into the world. YOUR WORK WILL BE POWERFUL. Maybe controversial and unappreciated by some. But you can open the door to every kind of possibility, changing the world.
