Can we have both?

I really enjoy playing Spider Solitaire. I find it has metaphors for life in it, and helps me think creatively and strategically.

I was playing it this morning, and early in the game I saw there were two red aces. One was sitting on a red five and the other one was sitting on a red three. There was a red two available to move so I could move one of the aces, but which one? I wanted to free up both the three and the five for future moves. Dilemma! But then I saw, further along the row, another red two I'd overlooked. I could have both! I could move both aces, and free up both cards, and the game could proceed in peace, more satisfactorily. It was just a question of looking until I'd assimilated the whole picture, standing back enough to see all the possibilities, taking the time and care to absorb all the options. But even though I could have both, I still had to do one first — I could move only one card at a time.

And of course, sometimes in Spider Solitaire you move a card (or a stack of cards) with the intention of moving them back again later — you have to see what will be freed up by what move. It's kind of similar to a dance weaving in and out, moving forward and back.

I came to my game of Spider Solitaire from a while spent on Facebook — I went there interested to see if had recovered for the moment from its global outrage, and yes it had; well done those people! So I spent a few minutes on Facebook, where a friend had posted a memory shared from a group for men's rights, pointing out that social conventions impose constraints on men as they do upon women, and that consequently sometimes it is who  men are subject to domestic violence. 

This reminded me of the Black Lives Matter movement, countered by Far Right groups taking up the alternative slogan, All Lives Matter.

Of course it is true that all lives matter, not just black lives and indeed not just human lives. It is true that some men suffer from domestic violence and men must have human rights as well as women. 

But, just as in Spider Solitaire, you move one card as at a time. Sometimes, you have to take this card over here to make that card free. You have to work with what is presenting and available. But the objective is never to move just one card, it's to win the whole game.

In the Black Lives Matter movement, the objective was to move one card, to move away the racial injustice of white supremacy to free up the black people trapped under it. The white people had to be moved aside to let the black people breathe. The white people were still in the game, they still mattered; social justice issues that affected them like poverty and gender disparity hadn't ceased to be important — but it was the white people who had to move this time, because they were kneeling on the black people's necks. You can only move one card at a time. Once you've moved that one, you move the next — you look at something like dumping of toxic waste in areas where poor people live, and you move that card to let the poor people breathe, set them free. You can't win the game by just throwing the decks of cards across the room shouting "All Lives Matter!" and letting them land where they will. That doesn't achieve anything.

In the same way, with violence towards women, if that's the card you're moving this time then it's not helpful at that point to start talking about men's rights and how men suffer from violence too. Yes, of course they do, and we can get to that. But we have to get there one step at a time. Acknowledging how unsafe and vulnerable women can be just walking home from work is an important thing to address. We need to lift away the card of violence proceeding from men's sense of entitlement in respect of women (I felt depressed to read that domestic violence towards women goes up significantly in connection with football World Cup matches, and even more when the man's home team loses). We need to set women free from this, lift that oppression away from them. Domestic violence against men is indeed another card in the game, but we can't get to that yet, because other cards are nearer the front.

Sometimes, like me and my red aces, we see that we can have both. Some set-ups make it easy to achieve more — but even so, we have to do it one step at a time. If we say Black Lives Matter, or advocate for the rights of women to live safe from violence, we aren't overlooking or forgetting the suffering of white poor or men trapped in miserable homes with violent women — they, too are hidden face down under the decks of cards, or imprisoned so far back along a stack face-up that we have to work patiently and strategically to reach them. But we'll get there.

Step by step, by slow and patient means, by looking deeply and acting strategically, we join in the work of God for healing the world. Spider Solitaire can be taken up as one of the ways we pray, one of the ways we learn to see.

Freedom and peace and hope for women and men, for white and black — yes, we can have both, but we do it one move at a time. We start with what presents. We make our moves, working with what we can reach, with what we have, with what the presenting picture and the shape of things might be, this time.