I love history. I love seeing the repeating patterns and understanding the context for the pressing questions of our day. These questions we face are the riddles that stumped our ancestors – what will our answers be?
I recently saw an animated short “Bartolomé de las Casas – Changing Your Mind” by Extra History. In a nutshell, Las Casas was a 16th century Spanish solider turned priest turned human rights activist. Though initially participating in the atrocities against the native peoples and receiving an encomienda (= land + slaves) from the Spanish Crown, Las Casas later spent 50 years advocating against these injustices.
While he wasn’t perfect (e.g. only belatedly decrying African slavery), he did what can be so difficult to do — he changed his mind. Not only that, he worked to dismantle a popular system that was rigged in his favor.
Changing one’s mind is one of the most humbling and also liberating actions one can take. From the emotional intelligence stand point, doing so requires a person to utilize practically every EQ tool in the toolbox — awareness, critical thinking, empathy and sense of purpose greater than oneself. In Las Casas’s case, it took years of marinating on injustice, culminating with divine revelation.
Las Casas wrote books, engaged in debates and did his best to influence political policies. Yet the majority of people in his day did not have ears to hear his message. Progress came haltingly, after stalemate and set back. In retrospect, realizing that genocide, forced conversion and enslavement of entire peoples for the profit of a few is wrong — seems basic. Yet these very issues are still with us today in all sorts of unjust permutations and progress still comes haltingly, after stalemate and setback.
As a society, we have such powerful potential to change for the better. That change begins with our own minds. Some questions to consider:
1) Whether at the personal or societal level, what injustice are you pretending not to notice? What is the cost?
2) What renewed connection, what upliftment, what transformation may come — if you / I / we have the courage and grace to change?
