I’m going to steal this.

Tim Shriver, CEO of the Special Olympics, just blew my mind. Here’s what he said, on the Colbert Report, March 30, 2011:

I don’t want to be a cop, I want to be a teacher. You are allowed to be humiliating, degrading, and hurtful. I’m allowed to petition you to at least recognize what you say and be aware of the option you have to stop.

This is possibly the best framed defense of social justice work that I have ever heard. We can’t change everyone—we can hope, but it would be destructive, in this field, to go to work expecting total overhaul. And the things we teach, about inequality and oppression and entitlement and privilege, are often nearly impossible to police. Humans will misbehave, they will abuse power. They have proven throughout history, however, to also have the capacity to learn and change and treat each other with respect. They often simply need to be taught a new type of awareness. A great beginning, as Shriver points out, is to recognize the power of language to hurt, and consider the option to stop. And so, newly inspired, here I go—back to work.