By Larisa Manescu
2017 felt rushed, frantic, disheartening, exhausting. Time is always hard to quantify, but everyone seems to agree that this year went by too quickly and brought an onslaught of bad news.
2017 was all that, but for me, as a relatively new addition to the Sierra Club (I joined the Texas team in late July!), it was also a year of tremendous personal growth and re-discovering purpose. Despite the polarized political climate threatening to dampen my inner optimist, I'm grateful for the close relationships and lessons learned from the people I have the privilege of working with everyday. Sometimes certain aspects of communications work, like the fast-paced nature of press statements, can feel reactive instead of proactive, but I find solace in the bond I've developed with my co-workers (who I'm so grateful to be able to call dear friends) that will only grow deeper roots in 2018.
I do fear that we may get used to celebrating the bare minimum when it comes to political victories, like Doug Jones winning the Alabama Senate seat, and that's not how we hold power. I've heard the conversation over and over again this year: How do we change people's minds when there appears to be no common ground? When deeply rooted beliefs and values just don't line up? Part of my job is to frame an issue in a way that different values still line up on the same "side."
But I can't help but hope that the arc of history bends toward justice, even if it feels painstakingly slow or like we're taking 10 steps backward for every step forward.
Instead of seeing my work as fundamentally changing minds, I see it as mobilizing, lighting a fire inside the hearts of those who are already on the same page, or at least in the same book. The rug is being pulled back more than ever on systematic oppression (with movement moments like Black Lives Matter and Me Too) and it's exposing that we're our own worst enemies, that the world isn't divided into the binary categories of "good" and "bad" people. That is a scary truth to reconcile with, but it's also an incredible opportunity to understand that we are capable of shifting the larger forces at play if we commit to sustained self-evaluation and work to obliterate the status quo that has kept people silent and powerless.