Wait a minute?
What? Evil?
Yes.
At the heart of all cape-wearers is the passion for protecting someone or something from a perceived evil. It is true, I prefer to not grant these perceived evils airtime on Wear the Cape. While I am not a... (what's that bird with the head in the sand? Stork? Pigeon? Flamingo? Ostrich?) an ostrich, I do know about the evils and feel the need to know them well, to understand them, to see all sides of them, I don't give them airtime here. They get their own airtime. Their supporters can see to that responsibility. I don't need to help them out with that.
Sometimes, though, I like to remind myself why I am I here. Why the cape-wearers do what we do. We are defending our most precious resource--learners. We are protecting them, their growth, and their rights as learners. We teach them to wield the powers of knowledge, skill, effort, creativity and resilience with grace and integrity. We work within a system that includes challenges, villains, and evils. We understand the reality of that and choose to do the work anyway. We see the challenges, we strive to understand them, but we do not waste our time in bemoaning them, engaging them in fruitless conversation, succumbing to them. We continue to do our work, to strengthen our resolve, and to improve at each opportunity.
That is what cape-wearers do. Are you a cape-wearer? What cape-wearing have you done lately?
Since you taught me the phrase, I find myself "celebrating the problem" quite a bit. I think it's because I'm trying to figure out so many new people, and have the need to check in that we're all seeing the same things. Before I put on my supersuit, I want to make sure that this actually is a job for Superman. Evil is a useful compass point.
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