Stacee Reicherzer

I see you good folks working in crisis centers, hospitals, and mental health clinics, serving those who suffer most acutely the stress of isolation.

One phenomenon I’ve observed is that the workplace creates precisely the right type of circumstances for individuals to get all of their old feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy triggered. Some individuals in these circumstances lash out and become aggressive as a tactic for trying to restore their worth. Whereas workplace violence is a significant problem, physical attacks are much less frequent than relational aggression: gossiping, intimidation, demeaning. When we consider how commonplace these behaviors are in organizations, and how they impact both the victim and the organization as a whole, we can begin to understand the nature of this problem, and how they really are the adult link to playground bullying behaviors among children.

I do a lot of social consciousness lectures and presentations in my work as a consultant. One of the things I’ve continually stressed is the need to learn from and engage in each other’s civil rights efforts because these are essentially our own. This seems to puzzle many people, so I use examples of some of the more successful civil rights outcomes of the 1960s. Many groups, such as the Black Panther Party, understood that their sociopolitical agenda was in fact part of a larger global effort for all persons of color to actively overcome the racially oppressive and imperialist contexts in which they lived. Even while the settings and players were different, as the BLP and other organizations understood, the system of oppression and the pain of loss it caused were shared by all. The shared value was of dismantling that system.

Having lived out for the last 25 years, first as a gay boy, and very shortly after as a transsexual woman, I tend to maintain a level of cautious optimism about the LGBT liberation struggle. There’s always something in the news about our community, and I am very grateful that it’s no longer a given that we’re referred to using terms like “homosexuals” (in the cases of gay men and lesbian women) or “transvestites” (in the cases of transsexual women). Yet, there always seems to be another shoe that drops when we make any progress: a state or nation supports gay marriage, some entity vows to fight it and does so; schools make an effort to reduce bullying of LGBT youth in schools, someone in a position of legislative authority opposes it and fights it. The shoe that dropped this week, however, was that of none other than the President of the United States, Barack Obama, who declared his support of same-sex marriage.

I missed blogging last week due to work I was doing in Costa Rica with a group of distance-based students. It was enormously rewarding in many ways, learning about both the local community as well the larger and varied texture of Hispanic culture representing different countries and regions of Latin America. It’s a real blessing to do the work that I do.