August 18, 2023- A world famous entrepreneur and television host walked into a Red Cross shelter-with a full camera crew and other members of the entourage. The shelter manager informed one and all that no filming or recording was allowed inside dormitory area of the shelter. This is standard procedure for ARC shelters. The crew and most of the others left, but the famous person stayed and distributed items that she had brought along. The performative element of the visit was foregone, with no real damage to the agency of either the donor or the shelter clients.

Personal agency is, as I have said earlier, a most important thing to honour. So, for that matter, is collective agency, that which acknowledges the integrity of a community of people. I am not threatened by the presence of anyone who identifies as gay, bisexual, questioning. I am not threatened the presence of a transgender person. Conversely, I am not threatened by the presence of a conservative, fundamentalist, traditionalist human being. I know who I am, and not being influenced by someone whose life experiences are different from mine, honouring their agency and their humanity is not at all difficult.

Honouring a community is, likewise, not difficult. Having lived and worked with Dineh, Hopi, Korean and Vietnamese people helped me see things from a wider perspective. Visiting with people in all fifty states and D.C, all ten Canadian provinces and thirteen other countries has only expanded that perspective further. Community involvement, here in my community of residence, is the cement that reinforces respect for individual and collective agency, day to day.

These thoughts come to me, after a short postmortem on the recent “Copper 2 Gold” series of discussions on overcoming one’s lingering prejudices, particularly with regard to relationships with People of Colour. There is a legacy left by colonialism, and by the individual and collective sense of superiority that spurred that colonialism, in the first place. It doesn’t require a system that is identified by a colloquialism from the dialect of enslaved people (“woke”) to correct its excesses, but it certainly needs every single person to examine his/her lingering misconceptions and prejudices, and to do so earnestly.