Day 34 Convenient Ignorance; or, The Willful/Willing Debate

Once again some of the news cheers me and some of the news makes me want to cry. I can’t be alone.

Pastors suing the State of California for religious discrimination—no!
Do they know what they’re doing to their followers? Uh, anyone?

Prisoners released from prisons and jails—yes!
To go where? Crowded projects? Uh, anyone?

Disproportional African-American and Latinx deaths—no!
Are we focusing our care on those communities? Uh, anyone?

Opinion columnist Jennifer Senior wrote a piece called “The One Kind of Distancing We Can’t Afford.” It is principally this that prompted today’s essay although I’d been dancing around it for a couple of days.

The subtitle of the article was “The only way to fight this pandemic is through identification with its victims, not deliberate estrangement from them.”

What’s at work here, really, is a subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, us-versus-them-ism.

The subtext is: Well, as long as it’s not me or my peeps.

There’s a sad, sad ouch here.

“[W]hen reminders of our own mortality are never more than a few paces from our conscious, clattering minds: We are silently building moats that separate ourselves from the dead.”

Except the degrees of separation are narrowing the longer we live with The Trump Pandemic, and they are on a trajectory to become narrower still.

There is a long-standing tradition—millennia—of placing blame when encountering illness.

It’s even featured in the Christian Scripture in the Gospel of John 9: 1-3.

9 And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.
2 And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
3 Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

I guess I can go for that, karmically speaking. Who wouldn’t agree to have the works of Divinity made manifest in themselves?

Except I’ve always thought it no mistake, and quite astonishing when you think about it, that of all the ailments in the world, from alopecia to zika virus, the one chosen for this story is blindness. Blindness from birth.

I know the story refers to physical blindness, an inability to use one’s eyes to see. I know this. But what if it is also meant metaphorically? About other kinds of blindness.

Here are a few: blind spots, prejudices, an unwillingness to bring a heart that sees, spiritual blindness. I’m sure there are more.

Mx. Senior writes, “It’s the other culturewide distancing campaign. The first, we know about: to socially distance, which is deliberate and altruistic. But this one, to psychologically distance from the suffering and the deceased, is more furtive and fraught. It is certainly understandable, and probably even adaptive. But we’d do well to guard against it.”

The question I ask today is harder still: Can we guard against it? I really mean: is it even possible?

The nature of blind spots is that they’re ... well, uh ... blind, right?

Here are some of the social outcries I’ve heard lately during this crisis:

We have to protect those in nursing homes.
We have to be concerned for the homeless.
We have to see that domestic violence is growing exponentially.

Just these three groups of people, I’m sure we can all agree, are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus. They need to be able to practice physical-distancing. How can they? Where can they? It’s all well and good to call out what’s needed, but are we willing to do something about it?

We, who are not in these groups, are also called upon to be able to practice. But practice what? Practice heart-seeing. Not only that but, if we practice heart-seeing, then we cannot stand in convenient ignorance, by which I mean, willfully ignoring what’s in front of us.

Instead, we get to see that yes, these three groups—and there are many more—need to practice physical-distancing, and yes, they need to help to figure out how. Whose responsibility is it to help them?

I write a series of novels called Boots & Boas about a group of friends who call themselves “The Butch Brigade.” One of their permanent mottoes, set up by the leader of the group ob/gyn Dr. L. Ravenal Lange, known to her buds as Raven, is: Taking care of it means taking care of all of it.

The pissing contest between Governor Cuomo and the Narcissist-in-Chief reached such heights this morning that it ought to be sculpture. Bronzed, and displayed upon the mantle, like those baby shoes that were a thing for years.

Governor Cuomo has made a pact with six neighboring states to work in tandem to restart life on a measured path to economic recovery. Governors on the West Coast did the same.

I’ll simply quote the response.

“Those moves apparently enraged President Trump, who, in an extended diatribe, claimed his authority to decide when it would be safe to ease restrictions and reopen the economy was ʻtotal.’ ‘The president of the United States calls the shots. They can’t do anything without the approval of the president of the United States.’”

Personally, I got a tickle from Governor Cuomo’s answer to that. “In response, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York questioned how Mr. Trump could claim the authority to open the economy when he had earlier said that he lacked the authority to close it down.”

Moving right along ...

From Jesus’ disciples to us today, a lot of us ascribe guilt to illness. Take it from someone who has lived with a chronic disease; this notion is alive and well and living in Paris right along with Jacques Brel. Whose fault is it? we ask. What did you do wrong? we ask. In theological terms, Who sinned?

No one is the true answer. Or, Everyone.

Mx. Senior calls this “a modified, pandemic-ready version of the just-world fallacy, the bias that makes us believe that good things ultimately happen to good people and bad things ultimately happen to bad ones.”

Are we denying our own mortality? Sure.
Are we denying our own fear? Of course.
Are we denying our own vulnerability? Yes.

What’s head-spinning to me is that we deny our own vulnerability at the same time we point out the vulnerabilities of others in a game of social hot potato.

How is it that we cannot see our own willfulness?
Is it that we cannot?
Or is it that we will not?
Are we even willing to see our own willfulness?

Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe a combination of all of the above.

What I do know is this: when New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked about supporting Joe Biden, she said, “The whole process of coming together should be uncomfortable for everyone involved—that’s how you know it’s working.”

I’d like to borrow her wisdom.

Vulnerability, Beloved, is uncomfortable. Yours, mine, and ours. The word itself means woundable.

No one likes being vulnerable. We like to deny that we are vulnerable, but that’s a lie. Look at the especially vulnerable all around us.

From the pastors who are shrieking religious freedom ... and somehow claiming to their parishioners that their faith makes them invulnerable to Covid-19 to the college students who played beach blanket bingo over spring break ... and somehow believed that their youth made them invulnerable to Covid-19, like it or not, vulnerability ‘r’ us.

Whether we’re willing to be vulnerable or willful about our vulnerability doesn’t matter.

Mx. Senior finishes her essay, “The only way to fight this pandemic is through identification with its victims, not deliberate estrangement from them. As we spend weeks—months—in isolation, it’s our connectedness we ought to keep in mind. This virus affects us all. Je suis Covid.”

Who was born blind? Maybe me. Maybe you. Maybe all of us. But the eyes of the heart are not blind. The eyes of the heart do not practice convenient ignorance. The eyes of the heart see what is and take care of it. Take care of all of it.

Shall we?

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com

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