When I was sixteen, I got an after-school job in a drugstore downtown.

Two black girls took turns training me. They were in their twenties and had been working there for a couple of years.

About a month later I was working with one of them when she casually asked me how much I was being paid, so I told her. I could tell by her face something was off, but didn’t question her.

The next day when I came into work the owner called me into his office and told me to NEVER again discuss my pay with other employees.

What I found out was that I was making more as a sixteen-year-old new hire than two black girls who had trained me and been working there much longer than I.

I didn’t know what else to do so I went home that day and never went back.

This is the meaning of white privilege.

It doesn’t mean we have had easy lives or never worked hard or struggled.

It means we get privileges we don’t even ask for because of the color of our skin.

If we want to find our way out of this chaos to a place of peace and equality, these are the things we need to face and correct.

DEI wasn’t created to give unfair advantage to those who aren’t qualified. It was made to level the playing field and make things like this illegal.

Imagine there’s an old apartment building filled with families, but the building is falling apart and needs many repairs. It still functions as a shelter, and some rooms need more work than others. One day the owner decided to finally give it the attention it needed to make it a more comfortable, functioning space for its residents.

The owner calls a male contractor who says, ‘the whole thing’s got to come down. It’s all bad and must be destroyed before rebuilding.’

The owner knows this will cause great hardship to its residents. They will have no place to go and will suffer greatly, living on the streets, going hungry. Some of them won’t survive.

The owner then calls a female contractor who agrees the building needs a lot of work, but she can do it a unit at a time. The residents can work together by staying in each other’s apartments while others are being worked on. They will learn cooperation, community and how to make things new through loving and supporting each other during these times. They will find ways to help and rebuild in the most creative ways. Things they’d never even thought of before! They’ll suffer a bit of hardship, but certainly not such dire consequences as the complete destruction of the building.

I’m still trying to absorb the fact that the (mostly white) spiritual community chose the former. That they could not envision anything but total collapse. That using their free will, leaders in these communities repeated over and over how destruction was necessary for rebuilding. Isn’t that covert religious dogma? Suffering followed by reward? Are we unable to envision a beautiful life without horrible suffering first? This is the corrupted masculine training. Conquest before victory.  If you’re telling millions of people destruction is the only way, at what point does it stop being prediction and start being creation?

I believe this is the time of the rebirthing of the Divine Feminine. She is showing us that we do not need to suffer to live a beautiful life. I am greatly saddened that so many in the spiritual community could not see we had a choice between total destruction or rebuilding with cooperation and love. That our vision was so clouded with our suffering/reward training that we could see no other way. That we forgot that love is the most powerful force on earth and can overcome any obstacle.

Now we will all have to live with this painful, destructive road that mass consciousness was programmed to choose.

We will get to the promised land, but my heart will always ache for the kinder, more loving road She tried to show us was available, but we chose to ignore.