Happy Women's History Month Reader!
Last week I attended a Community Seder.
Even that felt layered.
Because these are tense times. Violent times. Times when identity, government, grief, and global harm keep colliding in ways that are difficult to hold cleanly.
As an American who is dissatisfied, disappointed and angry about the chaos my government is inflicting, I do not want to be judged solely by the choices of the United States government any more than I want to judge all Jewish people by the choices of the Israeli government.
That was already sitting in my ribcage when I read the article about the recent United Nations vote declaring
"the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity by reason of the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labour, property and capital.”
The United States was one of just three countries to vote no.
And while that is its own kind of disgrace, what caught me most was not only the vote itself.
It was the logic underneath it.
One statement in particular has stayed with me.
In defending the U.S. position, Ambassador Dan Negrea said:
“Furthermore, the US does not recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.”
He said that with his chest.
And this moves the conversation out of the moral realm and into the procedural one.
This says, in effect:
- it was legal
- it followed the rules
- it met the standard at the time
As though legality has ever been a reliable measure of justice.
It has not.
This is one of the more dangerous habits systems have.
When the human weight of a decision gets handed over to:
- policy
- precedent
- legal language
- bureaucracy
- tradition
- process
…so that no one has to fully own what happened.
I’m calling this behavior bureaucracy bypassing because it reminds me of spiritual bypassing - using spiritual practices to avoid discomfort or unresolved emotions.
Sometimes rules protect people.
And sometimes rules provide cover.
Many of the greatest harms in history were not carried out in the absence of structure. They were carried out through it.
Authorized.
Recorded.
Filed correctly.
Things happen while we watch. And we might not notice or think we need to.
Institutions too often reach for:
- distance without responsibility
- process without ownership
- legality without accountability
And we often do the same thing in smaller spaces.
At work.
On teams.
In families.
In leadership.
Not always through cruelty.
Sometimes through habit.
Sometimes through fear.
Sometimes through the quiet comfort of saying,
“Well… technically…”
Harm does not become less real because it can be explained neatly.
I invited the LinkedIn audience to let this question marinate . . . and I would love for it to rest on your mind too:
What happens when rules become a place to hide?
