The story she told went something like this.
Once there was a village living beside a
river. One day the people of the village saw a baby floating down the river,
and as expected, motivated by compassion they quickly mobilized to rescue it.
One family offered to care for it whilst trying to think what the next step
should be. However there was not much time to strategize as the next day more
babies were found floating down the river, and more rescuing needed to be done.
This continued every few days and soon, most people in the village were helping
either to rescue or to care for the babies.
Then someone had the
idea to find out what was going on upstream that was causing the babies to be
in the river. So a group left the village to investigate. After walking a
couple of days, they came across a large contraption, a big machine that was
snatching babies from upstream villages and throwing them into the river.
I heard this rather disturbing story at The Justice Conference
in 2017, where it was shared by speaker, Lisa Sharon Harper, in order to
highlight the importance of, not just dealing with the symptoms of social problems, but to find the root causes
that might be driving the problems. It was a call to dismantle the systems and
structures that were oppressing people.
