The Bridge That Connects “I Don't Believe” and “I Can't Believe”

Have you ever had the experience of trying to wake up someone who simply will not be woken up? You know the person is still alive because you can see the chest rising and falling. Yet you simply cannot wake the person up no matter how hard you try.

I truly don't know how common of an experience this is. I however, have indeed had it—at least once.

I once had a roommate who was also a friend who also probably had a serious drinking problem. One evening or early morning, after partying all night, he somehow made it to the house we shared with another mutual friend. He drove into the driveway and managed to open the car door. That however, is as far as he got. He must have passed out right after opening the door.

Our other roommate found him there in the morning around 6:30 am, sitting in his car with the driver’s side door wide open with him slouched in the driver’s seat, sound asleep.

This roommate tried unsuccessfully for some amount of time to rouse him and to get him to come into the house. After having no luck, he came back into the house, woke me up, and asked me to assist him in trying to wake our friend and roommate. I complied. So now there are two of us outside at dark thirty trying to wake this man up. I would say we engaged in this adventure for about twenty to thirty minutes before we realized it was a lost cause. Since it wasn't winter nor summer we decided to simply close his car door and let him continue to “sleep it off.” At some point in the early afternoon of that same day he arouse and came into the house. We ribbed him endlessly about this event.

The truth of the matter though is that being a progressive social justice activist is really very much like this, much of the time. We spend a great deal of our time railing people to wake up about this or that thing, often to no avail.

WAKE UP people, about the unimaginably horrific genocide of black folks!!!

WAKE UP people, about the unimaginably horrific genocide of transgender folks, especially trans women of color!!!

WAKE UP people, about the horror of homelessness!!!

WAKE UP people, about the absolute faster than anyone would have predicted emerging deeper nightmare of climate change!!!

WAKE UP people, about the staggeringly unfathomable coming disaster of environmental breakdown!!!

WAKE UP, WAKE UP, WAKE UP, WAKE UP, WAKE UP!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE WAKE THE F#CK UP!!!

The problem is that many of us humans have a tendency to have great difficulty believing in horrors and nightmares that are not absolutely right in front of us, smack dab in our faces, or the ones that we are not ourselves being very immediately and directly impacted by right now. So what often happens is that when we activists are all the time railing others to wake up, what tends to happen is that people are quite resistant to these messages and the activists words fall largely onto deaf ears.

The photos that accompany this post are of the Richelieu Apartment complex in Pass Christian, Mississippi—a town I have been to more than once, BTW. It is the before and after photo of this apartment complex both before and after it was hit by hurricane Camille in 1969. Twenty-two of the twenty-three people who were in that building, on the third floor, throwing a “Hurricane Party,” were killed in that building when the category 5 hurricane struck. They had ample warning about the coming hurricane. They had plenty of time to find a safer place to be. They simply didn't believe it could possibly be as destructive and powerful as it was because they hadn't experienced anything of that particular brand and magnitude of destructiveness in their lives ever before.

So, what do we do?

Well, here is what I believe. I believe the people who are being implored to WAKE UP! are essentially in a state of not believing things are as bad as the activists are saying they are. They are just like those partiers in the Richelieu apartment complex in Pass Christian in 1969. And activists, for our part, can't believe things are as bad as they appear, we are in our own different state of disbelief. This is a relatively subtle insight I am describing here. What I am saying is that one of the strongest things that motivates activists to be activists is that we often quite literally cannot believe there is something going on in the world that is so horrible, so terrible that there really and truly has to be these groups of people called activists in the world to try to change this thing and to constantly be bringing attention to it. The other “can’t” we activists are often also dealing with is that we also can't believe that everyone else doesn't realize just how bad things really are around this thing or these things we are constantly trying to get everyone to WAKE UP to. So, on the one hand there are all these people who don't believe something is so bad. And on the other hand there are all these other people who can't believe something—that things are truly as bad as they are and that not everyone absolutely recognizes it. However, in that very slight difference between, I don't believe and I can't believe, I BELIEVE lies a potential bridge to a shared KNOWING.

All of us have had something happen to us in our lives that we can't believe happened. Mothers have given birth to children with all kinds of birth defects that they cannot believe is the truth they are now necessarily experiencing. People have had their houses or apartment buildings unexpectedly burned down and were in complete shock and disbelief that such a thing truly happened. Even though the reality of death is literally around each and every one of us every single minute of every single day, we have had people who we've known and loved who have died and where we have the experience of simply not believing they are gone. People have started companies they have unbelievably later been unceremoniously kicked out of, etc. Unbelievable things happen all the time.

I believe far more activist's events could become community events where people are not talked at and preached at and are not so stridently demanded to WAKE UP! The event could be less focused on the activists themselves and more focused on the people from the community who come to it. The events could be friendly, open ones where refreshments and healthy snacks are served and where there are seats arranged in rows and in the middle of the rows there could be a microphone on a high adjustable stand where a line can be formed behind the microphone for those who want to come up to it and speak. Someone could give a brief introduction that mostly consists of a sincere and heartfelt welcome. Then people would be invited to come up to the microphone and tell a story from their lives of something that happened to them that they can't believe happened and that they have also survived in some clear way or another.

People might be hesitant at first but I guarantee this would only be very temporary. Soon, people will be standing in line eager to tell the stories of the child they birthed that was born with Down Syndrome or some other ailment and how horrified and frightened they were yet how this child has now become the most amazing Light in their lives and how much they have learned about being a sacred human from her/him. People will be excited to tell the stories of the elders in their lives who were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and how they thought this would be the most dreadful burden they could have ever, ever imagined yet how this has not come to fruition. Far from it. Instead, they have connected with this elder in such profoundly new and beautiful ways and they acknowledge how they have been so truly and thankfully transformed. People will be enthusiastic to speak of their cancer diagnoses and AIDS diagnoses and other very serious diagnoses that were not only supremely unexpected but also that they wholly believed would turn out to be a rapidly encroaching death sentence yet are living, breathing proof of how they are still alive...thriving!

And then perhaps in the last ten minutes or so of the event, one of the activists representing the cause or organization that brought everyone together could say some direct words about that cause though only after listening to what everyone else there from the community desired to say about what had happened in their lives that was experienced as being unbelievable to them. Perhaps what the activist will speak of is something we as a people won’t in fact survive. That doesn’t matter. The main thing is that a new way of approaching WAKE UP consciousness would have been achieved and a bridge between “I don’t believe” and “I can’t believe” would have been built. The other main thing is that community would have also been built up more in the process. And the other, other main thing is that everyone would have welcomed and invited everyone else into the human communion from a place of shared deep listening and interconnectedness. And every bit of all of that are amazing accomplishments indeed.