Disrupting for Good (Not Just ‘Anti-Bad’)

It has been a very full month. I started November in Ottawa with my rare blood disorder group, hosting meetings including a two-hour roundtable discussion with patients, policymakers, physicians, and pharma reps, where we talked about the best path forward for timely and equitable access to new therapies coming to market. It also included a really hard conversation about historical and ongoing anti-Back racism in blood donation and the outsized impact that is having on the Sickle Cell community. 

Then, I had the opportunity of a lifetime to go to Madrid with my HIV/Hep C folks for a Community Awards event for community organizations across Canada, Australia, and Europe that Gilead, a pharma company, funds. They flew us first class, and it was truly an amazing experience. 

On National Housing Day, I brought author and policy analyst Ricardo Tranjan (remember me talking about The Tenant Class?) for two events in Barrie, including the launch of our Redwood Community Book Club. It was depressing to talk about how the housing system isn’t broken, it’s actually functioning exactly as designed. At the same time, it was also energizing to learn more about how tenants are coming together, recognizing their collective power to stand up for their right to housing, and they are starting to get some big wins that will have rippling effects, similar to the encampment court case wins setting new precedents in Ontario. 

That evening, I spoke at a public meeting at City Hall about the need to reinstate the affordable housing targets in our Official Plan, the document that outlines how our city will grow over the next 30 years. I have been advocating for an Official Plan that centres the interests of the people who actually live here over the interests of those who want to maximize profit off the people who live here. (That is not a controversial statement to make at most tables I sit at, but I get some snark when it’s a room full of developers there to present how they would like the Official Plan to bend to their own interests.)

Last week, I had an opportunity to present to a room full of patient groups (in real life!) about how we at Action Hepatitis Canada are holding governments accountable to their commitments to eliminate viral hepatitis as a public health threat, using our trip to Manitoba this past summer as an example. 

And through it all, there was this tension of being soft on people and hard on systems, of wanting people to like me and saying hard, true things anyway, of pausing before getting defensive and trying really hard to listen to learn instead of to respond, of celebrating our wins and being overwhelmed by how far we still have to go. 

Problem loving
In the background, I was still working through Shawn Ginwright’s book The Four Pivots. It’s all really powerful, and based on the month I was having, I was particularly struck by the idea of “problem loving.” He writes, “The problem with problem loving is that we become satisfied with discussing the problem and uncomfortable with imagining solutions. This is, of course, by design, and it’s how oppression works! The conditions of oppression and the challenges of everyday life force us into daily survival mode and ongoing crisis management.” 

I was uncomfortable with identifying as someone being oppressed. Ginwright is Black, and I thought, maybe he means Black people. But as I read on, I understood him to be writing to all of us: “We are all in an abusive relationship with oppression, and rather than leaving the relationship altogether, we choose to fight it. … Oppression has forced us to only solve problems, locking us into a way of thinking that keeps us in the same predicament. No fundamental change has ever come for problem fixing. We only reform and repair systems, institutions, and social relationships. There is no radical transformation.”

He explains that our word choice sometimes holds clues to our problem loving: fighting for accountability, resisting racist policies, confronting homophobia, demanding change, and struggling for justice. 

He says these terms are connected to oppression, and they predefine the outcome of work in ways that fail to affirm what we want to create. “We can never achieve what we want simply by pointing out what we don’t. … Peace is something entirely different from anti-violence; health and well-being cannot be adequately described as anti-illness, and love is not simply anti-hate.” He goes on to write, “Being non-racist and anti-racist are two sides of the same “not” coin, which never gets us to what we really need and want, which is belonging.” He ends with two questions to reframe our mindset: What world are you dreaming about? We know what we are fighting against, but what are we creating, imagining, and fighting for?

Moving from problem loving to possibility creating
So that’s the mental exercise that I’m trying to bring to my work right now as I shift from problem solving, or problem loving, to possibility creating. And honestly, it’s a more interesting conversation to have! For me, that goes a bit like this:

• What does a world look like where everyone with a rare blood disorder has timely and equitable access to the drugs that help them feel better, and how do we get there from here? 
• Imagine a world where you know you have hepatitis C, your doctor knows you have hepatitis C, and you’re ready to get treated so you can start that day. What policies need to be different than they are today? 
• We know that our whole community would be better off if everyone had a safe, affordable, hopeful place to call home. How can we use the resources and the collective power we have right now to move us closer to that reality?

Are you trapped in a problem-loving loop? Is there a possibility-creating reframe that brings some new energy to the conversation? If it’s a yes for you, tell me about it, I’d love to hear from you!