When I left Oakland, California and moved to Bremerton, Washington in February of 2015, I was a significantly broken, hurt, and beaten down man. Very few people at any level of intimacy in my life were aware of this with any real penetrating depths of awareness whatsoever.
I was also experiencing various emotional upheavals
as a result of many challenges I had endured in the year or so leading up to
that departure from Oakland. Thankfully I had enough wherewithal to recognize I
was grieving, and grieving all kinds and types of losses when I headed north.
If I hadn’t recognized this, I might have thought I was going completely mad.
However, I wasn’t going completely mad. I knew this quite decisively. Thank
you, God, for my having received that insight and awareness. Ultimately, I also
knew I was being given an opportunity to grow and exponentially so, yet through
the often tiresome though no less rewarding, well-known “trial by fire” school
of hard knocks technical school training so many of us go through in our lives
at some point and hopefully successfully graduate from. I understood this very
deeply and accepted it even if begrudgingly so.
Some of the losses I experienced and were grieving
were the physical deaths of several people who were close or important to me in
my life.
One friend—a short time prior to my departure from
Oakland—who had also been a former co-worker and mentor, whom I had known for
over twenty years, was murdered.
Three members of her immediate family had also been
killed in the grisly episode, including her husband and two of their teenage
children. The teenage son had killed his parents and his younger sister in a
rage of unknown origin. He then himself was gunned down a few days later, in
another state, during a shootout with local law enforcement there. This was all
shocking and incomprehensibly tragic. It was also an extremely surreal event
for all of us who had known the mother and/or her family. I was haunted by
nightmares for several weeks, inspired by my imagining why these events may
have unfolded, since no one really knew for certain. All the people who could
have lent some insight into it all were now dead.
Another friend I had known for a relatively short
period of time had recently chosen to end his own life, also, right before I
left Oakland. I had seen and spoken with him just two days before he died. I
was completely unaware of what was occurring within him that was experienced as
too much to bear less than forty-eight hours later. Clearly, he had already
made his decision when I had seen him. He had been in unusually calm and
collected spirits. I did take special note of that.
On the other side of the coin, I knew there was a
kind, sensitive, and experienced Zen teacher and hopefully a supportive
community attached to this teacher awaiting me in Washington State—the
destination of my flight from Oakland.
And I knew I had to take flight away from Oakland.
I had developed quite an allergy to Oakland in my last year or so there. I
didn’t have an allergy to the city of Oakland itself though I did find I had
grown quite weary of the city as well. I was even wearier of certain lingering
mostly recent memories with various people who either lived in Oakland or whom
I associated with Oakland.
All of this placed me in the rather interesting
position of both feverishly running toward something I suspected might
eventually be very significant and transformational for me and also feverishly
running away from something I knew I no longer wanted to be around any longer.
I also knew that experiencing both what I was approaching and what I was
leaving behind would eventually provide the foundations for a process most
likely unlike any I had ever experienced before.
Many of my thoughts, ideas, values, and life
philosophies were also in extreme transition during the time before, during,
and after my move to Washington State. Almost everything I had imagined my life
would be grounded in was up for grabs. It was both a very confusing and a very
exciting time all wrapped up in a box of divergent, strong, and often opposing
emotions.
Over the past several months while moving through
various healing processes, I had also taken some limited note of various
headline news reports that had come into my conscious awareness. Many were met
with mostly a passing indifference. However, my ears and eyes did tend to prick
up around the various reports that were connected, in any way, to the racially
driven upheavals, shifts, and movements that have been occurring in America
since a small city in the Saint Louis metropolitan area of Missouri named
Ferguson, burned its way onto most American’s radar.
There was a time not too very long ago indeed when
many of these very same types of news reports would have started a very
significant fire under me, causing my passions to become truly ignited. I
realized that the lack of this experience now was likely due to my simply
dealing with all the adjustment and settling in connected to my move from
Oakland to Bremerton. Yet, I also knew this was not the whole of it. Something
else was responsible for the lack of passion and lack of fire I experienced in
myself when reading or hearing of these very specific types of happenings in
the world all around me in the country I was born into.
I was born a black male into a white supremacist
world and country with all the attendant inequities, struggles, and challenges
that came with that in just my lifetime alone, not to mention all the
generational horrors and suffering that occurred to black folks before I was
even born, both relatives and not, though which I was intimately aware of and
that still impacted me. All of this pretty much cemented the probability that I
would become a progressive social justice activist. This is especially true
when other personality traits I have are also taken into consideration.
Then, once I realized I was a same gender loving
(gay) black male too, and began dealing with all the personal inequities and
struggles I experienced there, and again, not to mention the historic ones,
there as well, that also lived in my cells, the cement, if it was not already
hardened before, was certainly hardened now.
I unofficially became an activist when, as a young
boy, I strongly disagreed with my maternal grandfather whom I worshiped,
adored, deeply respected, and loved like no other man neither before nor since.
This occurred one evening at the family dinner table. We disagreed over the
topic of capital punishment. My grandfather absolutely supported it. I
adamantly repudiated it and still do. The chasm between our respective views
could not be diminished. I am proud of the fact that my very first and strong social
justice stance was being unequivocally against the death penalty without
exception and that I took that stance as a relatively young black boy.
Several years later I officially became an
activist, in my way of defining this word, in 1976, at the still relatively
tender age of sixteen, when I became a registered conscientious objector,
buoyed largely by my observation and analysis of almost everything I saw as
being a part of America’s involvement in what we Americans called, The Vietnam
War. This was doubly reinforced by my complete disgust with and anger at being
forced to sign up for conscription roughly two years later.
In the interim, between then and now, I have often
had a great deal of personal difficulty and disagreements with progressive and
liberal minded activists of almost every stripe imaginable. This has been the
case even though I, until very recently and have always before, at least since
age sixteen, myself identified as being a deeply committed liberal and
progressively minded social justice activist. What this means at its core is
that I have always found myself to be at odds with a community of people I saw
myself as having a great deal in common with. For a long time this was quite
perplexing to me. At first I attributed this to things I quickly came to
understand were not the source of my difficulties with progressive activists at
all. So for some time the mystery remained.
These difficulties first started to arise when I
began to recognize, in my late teens and early twenties, what I experienced as
a very clear and very strong disconnect, as well as a palpable cognitive
dissonance between the values I saw many progressive activists passionately and
publicly espousing and giving strong voice to and how I saw many of these same activists
treating, very differently, the people they said were the most important to
them in their personal and interpersonal lives. These seeming hypocrisies and
inconsistencies only grew in intensity, in my observation, over the years.
At this point, in my life today, a good portion of
the activists I know are also Buddhist practitioners. The form my criticism
often takes today then is a reflection of this fact. I often observe social
justice activists who are also Buddhist practitioners behaving exactly like all
other activists whose activism is not at all grounded in some kind of spiritual
or mindfulness practice. This is sometimes confusing and disheartening to me
because it is sometimes difficult for me to see and comprehend how these
people’s practice is positively influencing their activism. I see what to me
looks like so much vitriol, aggression, lack of compassion, sarcasm, mean
spiritedness, and passive aggression infused into such people’s social activism
and social justice work—even their Buddhist based activism work. Rarely, until
very recently, did I voice my critical thoughts. Instead, I mostly decided to
work on my own desired deeper living of The Eightfold Path in my own life while
trying to not be too distracted by the actions of others. Yet, I couldn’t help
still being very much aware of what I frequently observed and experienced.
Then on August 8, 2015 Marisa Johnson and Mara
Willaford interrupted Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during a
campaign stop in nearby Seattle. They grabbed his microphone and forced the
crowd gathered to listen to what they had to say instead of what they had come
to hear. At first this story, like so many before it, did not really register
on my radar. I had become aware of the whole brouhaha several days after the
incident had occurred. This is due primarily to the fact that the only way I
receive news these days is through the internet and I am on the internet very
infrequently. So slowly, at first, and then very rapidly, I began to realize
that many people I was connected to on social media were strongly engaged with
this story and had very strong thoughts and opinions about it. I am connected
to folks who represented various sides of opinion about this. This is not
unusual for me to experience because I have friends on every single side of the
political divide imaginable. However, the more I read my friends comments and
expressed opinions, the more I began to be drawn in. This surprised me. Nothing
had really drawn me in similarly for many months. At first I was very unsure
why this particular story was increasingly drawing my attention. What was it
about this story that had triggered me, or had ignited something in me, or had
stirred some sleeping beast within me? It was all another mystery to me at
first.
I decided to find and watch a video of what had
happened before I formed any strong opinions about the whole thing. Thankfully,
the video I found was one that contained audio from the very first minutes of
the incident. I also tend to walk around most times with all kinds of music
playing in my head. Often when I see something, a particular track is accessed
and I often cannot get that song out of my head for the next several hours.
When I first saw the video from the event, the song "Where is the
Love" by The Black Eyed Peas immediately popped into my head. The line,
"People livin' like they ain't got no mamas" is the one that
specifically queued up. The next thought that came to my mind was the thought
that these two women sounded like straight up bullies to me. I was bullied
growing up—a lot. So I know what bullying sounds like, thank you very much.
It’s hard to clean that shit up once one gets into that zone. Bullying has
probably been around since the beginning of human existence on the planet. And
it always sounds the same. I thought, Hmmm…to my ears, "If you do
not listen to her, your event will be shut down right now” sounded an awful
lot like, “If you don’t give me your lunch money right now, I’m gonna kick
your azz.”
Go tell it on the mountain, children!
Anyway.
I examined and reviewed all the arguments put forth
by those who strongly defended the actions of the two woman. Among these
arguments was a strong assertion that what these women were essentially
bringing attention to was the historic and generational disregard, wholesale
slaughter, pain, and suffering of black people and of our black communities
being under constant siege both currently and for hundreds of years under the
system of white supremacy and two of its strongest subsidiaries—white privilege
and racism. I had no problem with that.
There was also a belief put forth that in America
right now, these were far more important issues for us all to be addressing as
American’s than anything else any presidential candidate could possibly speak
of. I was cool with that too.
But then here were others whose strongest concern
was that taking a stance against the two woman simply had to be motivated by
some sense or a need for some form of wretched black assimilation. There were
the related and more pointed assertions that if one was black and opposed these
women’s actions, surely such a person was giving in to some expressed or
unexpressed sense of black respectability, which in fact and in truth is just
another albeit rather on the down low expression for wretched assimilation. With these assertions I saw the makings of a
distinct slippery slope quickly approaching. These particular defenders of the
two women often made wild and sweeping generalizations about whole categories
of black folks they didn’t even know yet somehow magically believed they
possessed the heretofore unknown to me, at least, mind reading ability to
incontrovertibly know such people had fallen victim of such things as
assimilation consciousness and/or black respectability consciousness. Oops!
Seems we’re on that slippery slope now full blast. Even with all that mind
reading foolishness, everything was still mostly cool with me even here. I
still was not ready to call an out and out foul.
There were also those who defended the woman’s
actions under the rubric that the liberation of black people in this country
was not to be directed by some fallacious and made up timeline that
conveniently fit into the comfort zones of those who were not the ones who were
to be liberated but rather, needed to fit solely into whatever schedule those
who were the ones to be liberated saw fit. Further, if that time ended up
occurring during a scheduled speech of a white, male, democratic presidential
candidate, then so be it. Seems we’ve cleared the slippery slope and are back
on secure ground again.
But again, others resorted to the argument that
since black women as a whole in this country were often not given full agency
in the world, and that because of this fact, these two black women, by necessary
and required unquestioned decree, should be given agency to do whatever the
hell they wanted with absolutely nothing else needing to be taken into
consideration and absolutely nothing standing in the way to impede them. Uh oh,
I see us approaching another super slick slippery slope up ahead there folks.
Fasten yo’ seat belts, baby’s. Seems like it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
I understood all of these arguments and defenses
intimately and very well. Each of them were par for the course type arguments and
defenses that deeply represented the progressive social justice activists hive
mind—a hive mind I had become very familiar with and had indeed been an active
participant of for decades. Personally, I found most of these arguments to be
reasonable enough. I saw most of them as being grounded in varying levels and
degrees of provable truth. I did not find any of the arguments and defenses
neither completely absurd nor completely indefensible. There were some very
slippery slopes. I had however, navigated far more slippery slopes in the past.
None of these arguments however, persuaded me to support the actions of the two
women’s performance in Seattle. Not in the slightest.
On the other side of the spectrum were mostly
arguments putting forth the idea that these two women had simply chosen the
wrong presidential candidate to “bully.” Many of these people seemed to have a
personal investment in Bernie Sanders himself and cited his time of marching
with Martin Luther King, Jr., during the civil rights era, as proof of this.
Many of these folks also presumably would have seen the two women’s actions as
being far less problematic and likely even wholly forgivable if they had taken
place, oh let's say umm, at a Donald Trump or a Ted Cruz rally. Lovely. As if
it was totally OK to bully someone simply because you didn't like him. Good
grief. Anyway. I understood these people’s positions. I however, was not really
that sympathetic toward them. Their concerns in no way represented the reasons
why I did not support the actions of the two women. For that, all I needed to
mostly do was examine my own decade’s long experience with progressive social
justice activists as a whole.
For years there often seemed to be this secret
understanding and unacknowledged agreement that the more apparently
self-indulgent, self- righteously indignant, self-absorbed, mean spirited,
bitter, and with the least amount of humility displayed—the far better
progressive activist one was near universally assessed and hailed as being. I
felt like there was this memo that was periodically being sent out to
progressive activists asserting precisely these sentiments yet somehow I
consistently failed to receive that memo. And also at the most basic plain ole
human level, I realized I now had an aging body that was disabled and always
experiencing chronic pain. I also recognized I, like everyone else who was
roughly my age, had spent much of my life dealing with my own and other
people’s drama and bullshit and the emotional and physical toll it had all taken
on me was now beginning to show—especially the toll from my own drama and
bullshit, mind you. Still, it simply began to wear me out always feeling like I
had to make excuses for the seemingly perpetually angry, petulant, external
locus of control obsessed, intolerant, seemingly narcissistic, self-indulgent
behavior of those in this tribe I increasingly and reluctantly belonged to
called progressive social justice activists.
The problem however, was not so much one of myself
no longer being in alignment with the underlying ideas, philosophies,
constructs, thinking, and understandings of what I viewed as the overarching
progressive social justice activist community and creed. That wasn’t it. The
issue was a little more nuanced than that. It was more an issue of approach, I
suppose, than anything else.
I now, at this stage of my life, desire a kinder,
gentler approach to my activism work than what I consistently seem to
experience with most other progressive social justice activists. I desire an
approach that doesn't seem to be so heavily influenced by unresolved and
inadequately addressed or unacknowledged or disowned personal pain, trauma, and
suffering. I desire an activist ethos less seemingly fixated on negativity,
pessimism, and despair. I desire an approach that's not so reflexively
defensive and so threatened by opposing ideas within its own ranks. I desire a
social justice activism that isn't so seemingly self-righteous, so seemingly
self-absorbed, so seemingly believing that all of us progressive activists
consistently live at the absolute center of the known universe, so seemingly
fueled by righteous indignation directed at those who are assessed as not living
at the absolute center of the known universe with us or passive aggressively
assuming and strongly hinted at by us as always being less smart and aware of
what takes place within the purview of “life in the real world” than we are.
I want an approach that is less snarky, less
sarcastic, less mean, less self-indulgent, less thought policing of those with
different takes on things and I desire an approach that is more obviously
humble. I desire something that is more empathetic, more infused with loving
kindness, and one that is more joyful and more loving—though definitely not in
a spiritually bypassing kind of way. I suppose when it is all said and done I
basically desire an approach to progressive social justice activism that is
more in alignment with how certain people both living and no longer
living—heroes and sheroes of mine in the past and also now seemed or seem to
approach social justice activism in their own lives—people like Nelson Mandela,
Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr, Peace Pilgrim, Grace
Lee Boggs, The Dalai Lama, and Thích Nhất Hạnh. It is a social justice activism
underscored with a spiritual acumen and consciousness that I can identify with
and understand.
Then one day, about a week or so ago, for no
particular reason that I could identify, I received a very strong impulse to go
retrieve my copy of Andrew Harvey’s book, The Hope: A Guide to Sacred
Activism. I knew it was somewhere in a closet in the house we are renting
that hadn’t been gone through since the move to Bremerton. For some unknown
reason I knew I was being instinctively drawn to this book and more
importantly, being drawn to two very specific chapters contained within it. It
took me almost an hour of diligent and near exasperated searching to find the
book in question. However, I did finally find it. I quickly flipped to the
first chapter I had been inspired to revisit. This was a chapter entitled, “Two
Stories of Sacred Activism.” As soon as I flipped to the beginning of the
chapter, I knew why I had been drawn to it. This chapter contained a story I
had read numerous times before. It was a story that had moved me deeply every
single time I read it. I had recounted and included the story in several Dharma
talks as a lay Dharma teacher. I had posted it on my blog several years ago. I
had bought multiple copies of the book when it first came out and gave many
copies to friends and colleagues, largely because of this story. I had somehow
forgotten just how important this story was for me. It is my understanding that
this story was first brought to popular
awareness in a sermon given by Rev. Maake Masango. After that, it has
appeared in various essays and books written by numerous writers, spiritual
teachers, and educators. Here is that story:
After the abolition of apartheid in South Africa,
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to bring the violence
of apartheid to light and to give both victims and perpetrators a chance to be
heard.
The Commission brought an old black woman into the
same room with the white man, who had confessed to the murders of both the old
black woman’s only son and of her husband as well. She had not witnessed the
murder of her son. However, as part of the sheer brutality of the deed, she had
been forced to witness the death of her husband. Because of this, she was able
to hear his last words before he died. Those last words had been, “Father,
forgive them.”
Now the old black woman found herself standing in
an emotionally charged courtroom, listening to white police officers
acknowledge the atrocities they had perpetrated in the name of
apartheid. Among these was the confession of the man who had murdered her
son and husband. The man who confessed to the murders was a one Mr. Van de
Broek.
Officer Van de Broek first acknowledged his
responsibility in the death of her son. Along with others, he had shot her
18-year-old son at point-blank range. He and the others had then partied while
they burned his body, turning it over and over on the fire until it was reduced
to ashes.
Later, he similarly confessed of the murder of the
old woman’s husband. Eight years later, Van de Broek and others arrived to take
her husband. A few hours later, shortly after midnight, Van de Broek then came
to fetch the old woman. He took her to a woodpile where her husband lay bound.
She was forced to watch as they poured gasoline over his body and ignited the
flames that consumed it. Now, Van de Broek stood
before her awaiting judgment. An assistant of South Africa's Truth and
Reconciliation Commission asked her what she wanted, what she thought should
happen to this man who had so brutally murdered the only family she had on this
earth.
The old woman replied:
"I want three things," she said calmly.
"I want Mr. Van de Broek to take me to the place where they burned my
husband's body. I would like to gather up the dust and give him a decent burial." "Second,
Mr. van de Broek took all my family away from me, and I still have a lot of
love to give. I want, secondly, therefore, for Mr. Van de Broek to become my
son. Twice a month, I would like for him to come to the ghetto and spend a day
with me so I can be a mother to him." "Third,
I would like Mr. Van de Broek to know that he is forgiven by God, and that I
forgive him, too. I would kindly ask someone to lead me to where he is seated,
so I can take Mr. Van de Broek in my arms, embrace him and let him know that he
is truly forgiven."
The assistants came to help the old black woman
across the courtroom toward the man she had just requested to embrace in her
arms. Mr. Van de Broek, overwhelmed by what he had just heard, fainted. As he
did, those in the courtroom—friends, family, neighbors, all victims of decades
of oppression and injustice—began to sing "Amazing Grace." Gradually
everyone joined in.”
The second chapter I had been drawn to was
entitled, “The Voice of the Fire.” In the first passage I am recording here,
Andrew Harvey is recounting a dream he had. Here is the first of the passages I
was intuitively drawn to in this chapter. He states: “One night I dreamed I saw
two rivers of flame meet in a sea of boiling fire and hear these words: “When
the two fires meet, a third fire is created, more powerful than either.” “When
I awoke and meditated on my dream, I understood that these two fires were the
fire of the mystic’s passion for God and the fire of the activist’s passion for
justice, and that in the fire I had experienced in Coimbatore, these two fires
were fused. In the greatest of human beings—Jesus, Rumi, Buddha—and in beings
of our own time such as Nelson Mandela, The Dalai Lama, and Martin Luther King,
Jr., these two fires were fused in a “third fire”—the fire of wisdom and love
in action.”
Further, in the second passage, here are Andrew
Harvey’s words about the fire he describes himself as experiencing in
Coimbatore, India—the fire he references in that preceding quote. I believe
this additional information is helpful in order to receive the full power of
the above referenced quote as well as to more fully understand what I was now
beginning to understand as the unraveling of my own sacred activist calling.
These words are Andrew Harvey’s from just a few pages earlier in the same
chapter in, Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism: “I realized increasingly
that what I had been put in contact with in Coimbatore was the primordial
fire-force of Divine Love known in all authentic mystical traditions: known as
Ishq (or divine passion) in Sufism, as Shakti in the Hindu vision, as the
Shekinah in Jewish mysticism, as the absolute Bodhichitta in Mahayana Buddhism.
The great universal mystic Ramakrishna called this force “Mother’s fiery love,”
and I came to understand that it was this divine fire of compassion that was
now going to be embodied in as many human beings as possible in order to
transform the world.”
And here, in all these words, in the remembered
dream sequences, and in the recounted South African story presented by Andrew
Harvey, lay my deepest understanding, my salvation, and also my future. Like
him, I had come to realize I am a man of the third fire. I always have been. I
simply had no concrete coherent knowledge of it, no conscious awareness of
there even being such a thing. I had even begun to refer to myself as a sacred
activist when I first read, Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism. I simply
had somehow allowed myself to move away from this out of thoughtlessness and
lack of attention. I had also allowed myself to get pulled off course; allowed
myself to be a follower in a crowd that was not mine to follow instead of
allowing myself to be the natural born leader that I am even if that meant my
becoming a lone wolf, for a time.
I now also fully understood why I had always
experienced such a disconnect between myself and many other progressive
activists, a disconnect that also seemed to be there even between myself and
various other Buddhist progressive activists and other activists who stated and
perhaps even truthfully believed their activism was rooted in some other
spiritual or wisdom tradition as well. These other folks I now understood were
of the activist’s river of fire, of the activist’s fire of the passion for
justice. I however, was from the third river of fire that was a merging of this
river of fire and the river of fire that was the mystic’s fire of the
passion for God. This explained everything. The veil had been lifted from my
eyes and now I could see. This accounted for everything. This was the
explanation for years of frustration, for decades of feelings of alienation,
for why I inevitably found Oakland to be such a difficult activism inspired
city to live in and for whose activist’s energy it was so difficult for me to
try to repeatedly and unsuccessfully absorb into my own consciousness. I
understood this to not be a question of one fire being better or worse than the
other. Rather, it was principally a situation where people found themselves
more called by the heat of one or the other fires. I now knew which fire’s heat
was calling me and my heart more authentically. I was deeply relieved. I was
very excited and overjoyed about my potential future, living and being
authentically guided by the third fire. Hallelujah! Praise God!
I found myself asking myself the question, what
if Marisa Johnson and Mara Willaford had also been motivated by the third fire
on some grand or even a minute level on that eighth day of August in Seattle.
What if they had each been motivated even just a little bit by the love and
forgiveness of the old black woman who had found herself before South Africa’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Just how might their actions have been
different in such cases?
I have no doubt there are those among us who imagine
themselves as being so unfathomably hurt, tortured, and traumatized by life
that they experience the actions of the old black woman in that South African
story as being only slightly less horrifying to them as those of Mr. Van de
Broek. I probably have such people in my own life. I sincerely pray for all
such people who hold that story in this way. That is what I can offer to you at
this time.
There are perhaps others who will assert that the
old black woman in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission story reached her
perhaps extreme level of love and forgiveness precisely through the many years
of experience that comes with getting to the place of being able to be called
an “old black woman.” I have many words I could use to adequately address this,
I believe. However, for now, I’ll only use two of them—Malala Yousafzai.
What most struck me about that story about the old
black woman is how, through her actions, she, who had her entire family
slaughtered by the man who is now before her, not only demonstrated profound
compassion, love, and forgiveness toward him but how by doing so and through
the heart-filled manner in which she did it, invited him, a fellow human being,
back into the human family, back into the human communion, The Beloved
Community. With that invitation she extended to Mr. Van de Broek the offer to
come back into full communion with the human family, the old woman had embraced
someone who very conceivably could have been lost to active and full
participation in the human family forever. Yes, he would have still been
walking around in his human shell of a body and form and through visual and
other perceptual prisms would have appeared to have still been a fully active
part of the human family. I however, am here to testify to the fact that
appearances can be and are very deceiving in such matters. I have met members
of the walking dead. Indeed, I have been among them for short periods of time
more than once in my own life. There are various types and sets of people in
the world whom, for all kinds of reasons, feel we have been actively or
passively uninvited from full participation in the human communion and The
Beloved Community. Some of us are men and women who have committed acts,
sometimes criminal or criminalized acts that the culture we live in considers
to be unspeakable acts. Some of us are consigned to less than full
participation in the human communion simply by certain aspects of our humanness
that came with us at the time of our births.
And, of course, Marisa Johnson and Mara Willaford
are also part of the human communion and absolutely, unquestionably need to be
seen as such. I understood that as well.
The world stage is vast, weirdly construed, and
constantly shifting. By far the largest percentage of people on the planet
stand very little to no chance of ever standing on that stage for even a few
fleeting moments. A very small percentage of people find themselves on that
stage for all or the greater parts of their natural lives. There then is the
relatively small percentage of us who, because of statistically unpredictable
circumstances and events, luck, providence, coincidence, or being at the exact
right place at the precise right moment, are thrust onto the world stage for an
extended moment for all to see, hear, and observe.
Because of the nature of the world stage in those
extended moments, our name may not even be recorded for posterity during those
moments we find ourselves on that stage. This is the case with the central
figure in that story from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
We only know her as “the old black woman.” Yet, of course, her namelessness
does not in any way reduce the significance and power of her contribution to
the world for those few moments when she inadvertently found herself thrust upon
its stage.
Once we appear on
the world stage no matter how fleeting our appearance, we will also find
ourselves before the extremely subjective and sometimes ruthless court of
public opinion. Sometimes this court is uncharacteristically loving and warm
towards us. Often it is viciously harsh. The court of public opinion, for the
most part, doesn’t care who you are. One can be a well-respected world leader
or other public figure with tens of millions of adoring facebook fans and one
may still find that for some portion of your time on the world stage, you are
completely vilified for something you did or didn’t do while on that stage. The
same is true for those who were completely unknown before their, most likely
quickly evaporating moments on the world stage, right before they retreat back
into relative obscurity, unlikely to ever return to the world stage ever
again.
Even though the court of public opinion is highly
subjective it is not entirely so.
You, as the one on the stage, also bear some responsibility for what you did while there even though there may understandably be endless interpretations and projections around what you did and why you did it or what you didn’t do and why you didn’t do it.
And what exactly did you do or what did some photographer
or videographer record you doing during your time on that stage? Were you a
nameless person caught throwing a Molotov cocktail into a crowd during a hoped
for bloodless coup? Were you a concealed Black bloc member during the Occupy
protests caught on film busting the windows out of buildings in downtown
Oakland? Were you captured compassionately rescuing an entangled and obviously
greatly distressed whale or dolphin from the perils of a fishing net that was
not intended for it though nevertheless is now ensnared in it?
Or were you involved in something, for whatever
reason, considered so newsworthy that it became imperative that you in fact not
remain nameless? Were you a—for the moment—nameless American police officer
caught viciously beating down a young black man or woman or person of color?
Were you captured literally taking the clothes off of your own back and
graciously and humbly handing them to a presumed homeless person whose eyes
spoke volumes about the endless gratitude contained within them? Or were you
recorded jumping up on a stage in Seattle, Washington aggressively grabbing the
microphone from a national presidential candidate during one of the candidate’s
requisite campaign stops and forcing the audience gathered to listen to what you
had to say?
You know, it seems to me, in that last example
there, at the very end of the previous paragraph, that one has to believe, at
least to a small degree, that he or she resides at the precise center of the
universe in order to do something like that—to place his or her own wishes and
concerns over everything else at that very moment and place, no matter whatever
else he or she may also believe or may be doing. The court of public opinion
will ultimately decide like it always does. It may not be fair. That however,
is how the world stage and the court of public opinion work. If you don’t like
the rules of the game, don’t play it or create your own game with its own rules
distinctly removed from all other existing games and their rules. Otherwise it
will simply look like you’re trying to use a clandestine and sly back door
approach to the existing game in which case you’ll still be subjected to the
rules of the world stage and the court of public opinion whether you like it or
not and whether you or your supporters think that’s fair or not.
Additionally, one of the things I learned from over
two and a half decades of working as a helping professional is that many people
are having an extremely bad day many days of the year even though their
countenance may not betray this in any way, shape, or form especially if the
person happens to be male. Many males have been culturally conditioned not to
show our pain, our emotional distress, our suffering. We’re supposed to hold
our heads high, swallow it, and pretend everything is A-OK. Let’s just imagine
for a moment, if you will, that Bernie Sanders was having a really bad day that
day when Marisa Johnson and Mara Willaford decided to abruptly interrupt him.
What if someone he had loved had fallen ill earlier that day? What if he had
found out just a few hours prior that someone he loved had been diagnosed with
terminal and inoperable or untreatable cancer? What if he had found out that
someone he loved had died that day? These, of course, are all hypothetical questions.
Still, being a helping professional for as long as I was I can remember
numerous accounts of anonymous people treating one of my clients badly or
without respect, or in a thoughtless or insensitive manner not at all knowing
these actions were directed toward someone in a serious and lifelong battle
with depression or in some other emotional deep crisis and that these
thoughtless actions whimsically engaged in brought their unsuspecting,
unwilling victim literally to the brink of suicide. Ask me how I know. OK! We have got to do better than this. We have got to be better than this. It is imperative if we are going to survive as a species. It is as simple as that.
Thinking about this, I suspect, is one of the
differences between the activist’s river of fire, of the activist’s fire of the
passion for justice and the third river of fire that is a merging of this river
of fire and the river of fire that is the mystic’s fire of the passion
for God, that Andrew Harvey speaks of because one of the first thoughts I had
when I heard of the actions of Ms. Johnson and Ms. Willaford, at Bernie Sanders
campaign stop was, “I wonder what kind of day this man was having before
that happened." There are however, those I suspect are of the activist’s
river of fire, of the activist’s fire of the passion for justice who have
absolutely shown a high capability for this type of insight. The two rivers may
not at all be as distinct as we might initially believe.
With all of this I also suspect a line has been
crossed by me—meaning that some enduring changes, shifts, and affiliations are
probably forthcoming if they have not already arrived. My experience of both
significant segments of the American black community as well as large segments of the
progressive social justice activist community has been that both, in general, have
relatively little tolerance for those within their ranks who do not tow some
theoretical though still seemingly intensely adhered to party lines and positions. No one
is immune, it seems.
When the esteemed History Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., former chair of The African American Studies department at Harvard University dared to write about black Africans’ role in the transatlantic slave trade; that there were black Africans who sold other black Africans to Europeans for profit, he was quickly vilified by many, overwhelmingly these were American blacks who, before this, saw him as a black God who could do or say no wrong and who ruled supreme among the relatively small circle of greatly respected contemporary black American intelligentsia. It took so little to go from God to devil, it seems. Yet, this is how it goes in certain circles in the world.
When Julia “Butterfly” Hill eventually grew into
sounding and writing more like an awakened and emerging spiritual master than a
radical, slightly angry progressive activist, her following began to shift
dramatically and I’m sure the audiences at her speaking engagements did as
well.
So many of us simply cannot deal with nor accept
someone within our ranks being an individual and not being slavishly beholden
to the outrageously enforced and monolithic groupthink. Membership certainly
has its rewards. However, you better toe the line baby, or you will be hung out
to dry faster than you can say Salem witch trials.
It’s all grist for the mill, I suppose. With this
piece I am taking a long overdue and decisive step away from the enslavement of
groupthink mentality. It’s likely just the first step in something much more
pervasive and meaningful yet to come. Throw another timber on the death pyre
with my name on it and be done with it.
Being
a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you
revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother’s womb is not enough to make
you human. People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors or
who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a revolution. The
oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor. Therefore, any group that
achieves power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act differently from
their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have
internalized and consciously adopted different values.
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