Day 90 The Bubbles of Our Oblivion; and, From Surviving to Spiritual Thriving

I cannot be the only person who squirms uncomfortably that Liberty University, a bastion of social conservatism that allegedly educates “Champions of Christ” by their own report, is headquartered in Lynchburg, Virginia. “Blackface and Ku Klux Klan imagery tweeted by [Jerry] Falwell, [Jr], who tolerates little dissent at the evangelical university he leads, has spurred staff resignations, demands for his firing by influential alumni, an incipient boycott and a raucous protest.” This is a champion of Christ? It cannot be.

“‘Your actions have shown you really don’t care about the black community, and that’s sad,’ Keyvon Scott, an online admissions counselor who had resigned in protest, said upon learning of Mr. Falwell’s apology. ‘You can’t say this is a Christian university, but then everything that comes out your mouth is about Trump.’”

It was a sorry-not in the least sorry, vain repetitions apology. Form without substance of any kind.

Nicholas Kristof, writing in Sunday’s Times asks “What if There Were No George Floyd Video?”

He says, “‘There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night,’ Robert F. Kennedy said in 1968 shortly before his assassination. ‘This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat.’”

In just one sentence, Mr. Kennedy shows-and-tells just how far-reaching systemic anti-blackness is. Poor nutrition alone, one mere drop in the bucket of the denial of basic human rights, has a lifelong effect.

Michelle A. Williams, the dead of the Harvard School of Public Health told Mr. Kristof, “Racism is nothing short of a public health crisis.” There are “vestiges of slavery and segregation that have permeated the social determinants of health.”

Here’s another devastating list, “Racism has robbed black Americans from benefiting from the advancements they’ve fought for, bled for and died for throughout history. That reality manifests in myriad ways—from underfunded schools to the gutting of health care and social programs, to financial redlining, to mass incarceration, to voter suppression, to police brutality and more. And it is undeniably harming health and prematurely ending black lives.”

There is much talk these days about ‘bubbles.’ They’re a recommendation for mitigating risk of infection by the coronavirus. There’s another meaning to bubble. Here’s the third definition from the OED: 3.3 fig. Anything fragile, unsubstantial, empty, or worthless; a deceptive show. From 17th c. onwards often applied to delusive commercial or financial schemes. See that ‘fig.’? It means figurative. [Code; not literal]

On the other hand, haven’t you heard the bubble of academia called the “ivory tower?” Or, the “beltway bubble” of Washington, D.C.? Bubbling isn’t new to Covid-19. We exist in social bubbles and always have. You have your ‘set,’ your group of friends with whom you share things. You have your family. You have your church or temple, you have your PTA, you have your spin-class bubble. Your college besties bubble. Bubbles, bubbles everywhere.

Mr. Kristof again, “But unconscious racial bias is widespread, resulting in what the scholar Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has called ‘racism without racists.’”

Personally, I don’t think Mr. Falwell’s tweet was unconscious racism at all. I think it was blatant, deliberate, conscious racism, and if he’d paused even one moment to reflect upon his constituency, he’d never have tweeted it. Instead, his ego was thwarted by the governor’s decree, and he had a tweetrum—a word I just coined. A tantrum on Twitter. [Oh, no one we know does that!]

We must learn to witness our own thoughts, words, and deeds, Beloved, before they become even more destructive than they already are. A moment’s pause from a heart tuned to love, as so many Christians claim, could have stopped the actions that stemmed from his white, male rage. If there were a willingness to self-monitor, self-reflect, and act upon those insights.

Dr. Davin Phoenix, author of “The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics,” a telling title, wrote an Opinion piece this week. “Anger Benefits Some Americans Much More Than Others.”

“This is simply the latest indicator that America has very different standards for who gets the privilege of expressing anger and defiance, without fear of grave consequence. Angry white agitators can be labeled good people, patriots and revolutionaries, while angry black agitators are labeled identity extremists, thugs and violent opportunists.”

Mr. Falwell’s is not a heart tuned to love. I would submit to you that he’s not a Christian, not a real one. Not one who is practicing anyway. His loveless heart is happy in the bubble of social conservatism it lives in, and that’s where rage and its effects thrive—in the bubbles of its own making. That kind of bubbling doesn’t self-examine. That kind of bubbling assumes both the rightness and the righteousness of its own position. That kind of bubbling cannot bear questioning.

Tara Parker-Pope, writing about the five rules for a pandemic survival playbook, says, “Risk is cumulative.” She’s talking about exposures to potential infection. I’m not.

Risk is cumulative, true. Spiritual risk as much as infection risk. If you can haul off and hit someone you love once, you have the potential to do it again. If you can write a disrespectful, crude tweet, you can do it again. If you can dismiss one human difference from you, you can do it again. And again. And again. And again.

This is why we must use the gifts of self-observation we’ve been given, and monitor our thoughts, words, and deeds. This world is indeed a laboratory for growth of all kinds, and we must be responsible for what kind of growth we want, and what kind of growth we are permitting to go on around us.

In the same article, Ms. Parker-Pope quotes Johannes Eichstaedt, a computational social scientist and psychology professor at Stanford University. “Moving into a long-term management phase, we have to start thinking like this. Don’t take risks where it’s not needed, and make trade-offs that are congruent with your larger health needs and priorities.” Add the word spiritual before health, Beloved.

Don’t take risks where [they’re] not needed, and make trade-offs that are congruent with your larger spiritual health needs and priorities.

So often the advice I’m reading takes us into the realm of survival issues. Are you reading the same? Of course, we must make choices to sustain our survival, but what about our ‘thrival’ issues? What choices must we make in order to thrive? It’s a trio, really:

Survive. Alive. Thrive.

Is this any of those three? I think not. “President Trump on Monday denied that systemic problems existed in American police departments, declaring that as many as 99.9 percent of the nation’s officers are ‘great, great people’ as he rebuffed mass street protests denouncing racist behavior in law enforcement.”

The calls to address the police brutality and the endemic prejudice within the system have moved to small towns like Petal, Mississippi, Pop. 10,000. Rick Rojas reported,

“In what has become a morning routine, Lorraine Bates walks the seven-tenths of a mile to City Hall from her house in Petal, Miss. She would keep coming, she said, until the mayor of Petal resigned, or at least exhibited something like genuine remorse for what he said about George Floyd after his fatal encounter with the Minneapolis police, including, ‘If you can say you can’t breathe, you’re breathing.’”

The horror of that statement paralyzes me. Ms. Bates, 70, sat on her rolling walker on the front lawn of City Hall. “As long as I’ve got my health and my strength, I’ll be out here every day,”  recalling the stamina of the activists who had influenced her years earlier as a young black woman rooted in the Deep South.

Here’s another good question, perhaps the best one I’ve encountered. “Why are police not wearing masks?”  

“In a march across the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday evening, Justina Heckard chastised police officers who stood unmasked outside the pathway. ‘Wear your masks,’ she shouted. ‘You’re not keeping the peace!’”

“I had an experience where I asked a group of officers why they weren’t wearing masks,” Ms. Heckard said. “And they told me it was because they couldn’t breathe. And I thought that was the most ironic thing.”

Ironic, perhaps, but also cruel, thoughtless, and glaringly oblivious.

We cannot afford the bubbles of our oblivion any more, Beloved. Not that we ever really could. But think about what’s going on in front of all of us right now. A worldwide pandemic, for which there is no cure or vaccine. We’re all at risk.

Two solid weeks of protests over the death of George Floyd, yes, but also over the senseless deaths of black men and women for centuries because of the unexamined bias that began, as Margaret Renkl so baldly states, “Since long before it was a country, our country has been in flames. When we arrived on our big ships and decimated this land’s original peoples with our viruses and our guns, when we used our Christian faith as a justification for killing both ‘heretic’ and ‘heathen,’ we founded this country in flames. And every month, every week, every day, for the last 400 years, we have been setting new fires.”

In the spiritual realm, fire is the element whose chief characteristic is transformation. It’s long past time.

Writing in “An Open Letter to My Fellow White Christians,” Ms. Renkl names names. “Christians set a fire every time we allow our leaders to weaponize our fears against us. We set a fire every time our faith in good police officers prevents us from seeing the bad ones. Christian voters preserve a system that permits police violence, unjust prosecutions and hellhole prisons filled with people who should have received the same addiction treatment we give our own troubled kids.”

Mr. Falwell and the Liberty University community are those self-identified, alleged Christians.

“We set a fire every time we fail to scrutinize a police culture that allows an officer’s own fear and hatred to justify the most casual brutality against another human being. It would be almost unbelievable to match an adjective like ‘casual’ with a noun like ‘brutality,’ but we have seen the videos. Watch the faces of justice shove an old man aside and leave him bleeding on the ground. Watch them drive their vehicles into protesters protected by the United States Constitution. Watch them fire rubber bullets directly at journalists doing work that is also protected by the United States Constitution. In video after video, note their unconcern with people who are bleeding or screaming in pain.”

There is an axiom in spiritual circles that goes ... don’t believe everything you think. We might adapt this to don’t believe everything in your own bubble. Ms. Renkl insists, “Make yourself look.” I don’t know whether she means this, but we must look at the assumptions of our correctness, Beloved.

She says, “We should know better by now. There are so many resources to help us know better, yet too many Christians ignore the history books that document the terrible legacy of slavery. We ignore the novelists who tell us why the caged bird sings. We ignore the poets who teach us the cruel cost of a dream deferred. In our carefully preserved ignorance, we pile all their books up in a great pyre, and we set them on fire.”

We have become social arsonists, convicted by our own oblivion to our own bubbling, and it must stop.

“We set the fire when we heard a peaceful crowd singing, “We shall overcome someday,” and understood that someday would never be today, that someday was at best still decades and decades away. We set the fire when we heard a peaceful crowd singing, “Lean on me when you’re not strong,” and believed it was time to call in the military. We set the fire when our “Christian” president cleared a peaceful crowd by spraying them with tear gas as though they were enemy combatants, marched to a nearby church for a photo-op and held up a Bible to imply that God is on his side.”

As spiritual parable author Paulo Coelho wrote, “One day ... or Day One? You choose.” I choose Day One. Day One to begin the process of loving ourselves into change that will make a world where all of us go far past surviving, and aliving, into thriving. Ms. Renkl speaks her Christian faith into works. “Love is the only way to put out this fire, love and listening and the hard work of changing.”

She recommends “We need to remember the words of Jesus—‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake’—and join the righteous cause of the protesters. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

George Floyd, too early by the reckoning of most of humanity, has gone to that kingdom of heaven. Jonathan Veal, 45, a high school teammate of [George] Floyd’s, remember[ing] the star basketball player [at his memorial service in Houston]: “George turned to me and said, ‘I want to touch the world.’”

Mr. Floyd, perhaps not in the way you would have chosen, but your prayer has been answered. Godspeed, good sir.

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  

© Dr. Susan Corso 2020 All rights reserved

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