In the culture of the United States of America, we have internalized a belief that to work is a moral virtue, and those who do not work are deficient in morality unless they have a reason considered acceptable by the dominant culture, such as retirement or a disability incurred by accident or in the course of doing one’s job. At the same time, we love and embrace technological advancements that increasingly render the kinds of work available to us obsolete while outsourcing other forms of labor, narrowing the field of work opportunities to tech fields, service labor, or middle management. We once had a vision of the future in which machines did most of the labor for us, freeing us up for family, leisure, creativity, research, passion, or contemplative pursuits. Instead we demean people who value those things over work and productivity as lazy or immoral and, on the average, have made ourselves busier than ever, more distracted, hustling harder and harder to do what Professor David Graber calls “Bullshit Jobs.”
The value of a person is intrinsic, it does not need to be justified by measurements according to use, money, productivity, or social worth.
Rivers, mountains, forests, and animals might also be considered persons with intrinsic value.
If we start with this foundation, then perhaps our economics and styles of relationship will shift. We no longer have the green light to exploit and pollute wherever we feel like it. We act with the knowledge that our actions cause harm to other beings—it’s unavoidable, it is a part of being a living creature–but as conscious beings we are accountable to the damage we cause. We cannot treat each other as objects to be used and thrown away. We cannot allow ourselves to be treated as objects to be used and thrown away.
by Missiondolores
Depression, despair, and anxiety might be telling you that the way you’re living your life isn’t lining up with your deepest values. Your anger might be telling you there is real injustice that you want to push against, though you might not recognize exactly where it is at first.
Letting yourself be bled to death and postponing the activities that give your life meaning is not a moral act, even if done for ostensibly noble reasons.
We can have lives of loving responsibility to those we care about while also following the truth of the heart. The trick is to give up our ideas about what these things are supposed to look like. The mind’s predictions are at best weather predictions–helpful for planning purposes, but then you might as well throw them away. If you’re out in the rain but insisting that it was supposed to be a sunny day, you’re not allowing yourself to be responsive to what is happening. You lose the chance to stay dry or simply enjoy the rain.
Guilt and shame are great for social control but terrible for growth and intimacy. When I’m feeling shamed by someone else, then usually I feel angry, defensive, or start wallowing in self-pity and self-abasement. I rarely think, “Oh, that’s a good point, I’ll try to change my behavior.”
In the past I’ve written that I am not a fan of positive thinking. (Though I am a fan of Zap Mama’s song “Vibrations” in which that is the prime message.) What I am coming to realize is that I am a fan of kindness, gratitude, and generosity. I suspect the origins of “staying positive” were more in line with these three qualities, but as I see it now, I think the whole concept has drifted into something that keeps people stuck and isolated.
In practice, “staying positive” seems to be about minimizing suffering and trying to pretend everything’s okay. “I’ve been crying every day, but I’m doing just fine!” More and more I think the culture of “being positive” is more about “looking like I am positive.” When we’re uncomfortable with someone else’s pain, we say “just be positive!” as a way to basically shut them up so that we don’t have to feel dragged down. This is understandable when I think of people who seem relentlessly pessimistic, cynical, or driven to demolish everyone else’s good time—and yet we could also say this about the activists and truth-speakers who have to break through denial to raise awareness.
In all, however, I’m not sure the injunction to “be positive” is very useful. I have come to dislike the way we moralize our feelings. This seems like another layer of that, in which certain experiences are okay to have and talk about while others are somehow corrupting one’s well-being or the mood of the group. Someone who is experiencing genuine suffering needs space to talk about it, to be heard and seen and not to be fixed. We need to allow ourselves this space as well. “I should be positive” is another way we criticize ourselves and try to keep parts of us stuffed in the Shame Closet.
“All Smiles,” Martin Cathrae
Recently I have started encouraging clients to try being kind to themselves, rather than trying to stay positive. Kindness is the practice of treating one’s self and others humanely, with basic dignity and worthiness. Kindness is not about blunting the truth of one’s perceptions, minimizing pain and anger, or lying. It’s about behaving and speaking in a way that is considerate, warm, and compassionate.
For example, we might look at the self-talk of “I’m an idiot for forgetting that deadline.” This appears to be coming from a place of self-criticism, speaking as though one is globally flawed (an idiot) for this lapse. Someone who’s trying too hard to be positive might have that inner self-talk but attempt to cover it over with, “Everything’s fine.” That jump takes us directly into minimizing or self-deception and it doesn’t work. Feeling and witnessing our emotions is what helps them to move. Without that step, they tend to become stuck. If we try starting with kindness, we might say something like, “I missed this deadline, and I feel upset about it.”
If we can start with kindness toward ourselves and others, we have a stronger foundation from which we can move into an outlook that is affirming and likely what is truly meant by being positive: “I’ll be able to try again next year,” or “I did my best.” In summary, positive thinking is a problem when we try to bypass pain and discomfort. You are a whole and beautiful creature and all of your feelings have worth and value. If you need to genuinely talk about something distressing so you can process the feeling and move on to being a powerful, kick-ass human being, and someone shuts you down by saying “just be positive,” you tell them to come talk to me.
One topic that I see batted back and forth often, particularly in gay male communities, is around the value of monogamy in long-term relationships. I’ve recently come across a few articles acknowledging that a sizable proportion of long-term gay male couples do not practice sexual monogamy in their relationships but arguing that secretly all gay men really want monogamy and are unable to sustain it, or alternately arguing that somehow because many gay men now have access to legal same-sex marriage they are obligated to practice sexual monogamy.
Gay men are not the only population in which people practice non-monogamous models of relationship. Non-monogamy includes a range of relationship models, including people who are emotionally in a closed relationship but able to have sexual experiences outside the relationship; people who have two or more committed sexual and romantic partners; and far more than I care to spell out here. (Inevitably I will leave models out or unfairly lump a few models together.) Dan Savage coined the term “monogamish” for couples that largely practice monogamy with very occasional sexual experiences outside the primary pair.
Some folks who highly value monogamy tend to insult or pathologize non-monogamous relationships. Arguments include that non-monogamy exposes the people involved to higher risks of sexually transmitted infections and romantic infidelities, or are inherently unstable. Some folks who highly value non-monogamy tend to insult or pathologize monogamous relationships, saying that those within the relationships are somehow stuck in a rigid moral code that is unhealthy and retrograde, or only do so out of fear and blind adherence to religious and social codes.
I do not think there is a “correct” model of relationship, and I do not think anyone should be pressured into a kind of relationship that goes against their values and needs. I think every long-term human relationship requires commitment, respect, friendship, intimacy, communication, and the ability to manage conflict. If a person feels isolated and neglected because their partner is out every night and does not come home to spend time with them, that is a problem in the relationship, not an indictment of whatever relationship model they’re working.
Entering into a nominally monogamous relationship does not guarantee that both parties involved will never have any risk of contracting a sexually transmitted infection; never have any risk of one partner leaving them for another person; never have any risk of feeling jealous, left out, resentful, or hurt. All of these things can and do happen to people who thought they were in monogamous relationships. Monogamy is a practice, and for many people this practice is deeply fulfilling and in line with their values and desires.
Entering into an open relationship or polyamorous relationship does not mean that those involved are somehow more evolved or freer, that they will have relationships free of jealousy, boredom, loneliness, or possessiveness. Every person comes into a relationship with a unique map of attachment and wounding, and every person has a limitation or vulnerability that needs respect when establishing healthy boundaries. “Open” does not mean “without rules,” it means that the rules are determined by all parties involved and require as much accountability and mutual respect as monogamy does.
Infidelity and betrayal happen in every type of relationship. Every rule can be broken in a way that is deeply hurtful. People could be belittled or ignored in any style of relationship, but so too can they share intimacy, respect, friendship, and mutual support. Relationships take the form of the people involved. We are complex human beings with complicated and contradictory needs, and relationships seem almost designed to stir up our vulnerabilities and fears even as we look to them to fulfill our needs. Every partner’s needs, desires, and frailties should have space for expression and respect within the relationship. These things also change with time, and so too must relationships.
What would life look like if efforts to grow and develop began from an attitude of love? For this conversation, I do not mean “love” as a feeling or impulse, but “love” like M. Scott Peck’s definition as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Another great definition comes from bell hooks in this interview: “Love is a combination of six ingredients: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.” This is about love as an attitude and approach, as a source of committed action.
Recently I’ve stepped back to look at my own relentless quest for self-improvement, and listening to others share their stories of efforts to improve, develop, and grow. One theme I’ve noticed in my experience is an attitude of “self-improvement” coming from the basic assumption that one is flawed, unworthy, defective, or in some way bad. From this perspective, one might look at a goal of becoming physically fit and healthy and frame it as, “I hate my body.” Other spurs for change include statements like “I hate my job.”
I almost wrote that hatred doesn’t necessarily motivate action, but then I rethought things. I think hatred does motivate action, but the motivated action is not necessarily one that promotes health, wellness, or joy. Hatred is about aversion and repulsion. Hatred doesn’t focus on what is desired, only what is despised. It’s a feckless creature. Some days, my body hatred might spurs me to eat three donuts and confirm the reasons why I hate my self or body. (“Now I feel gross. I’ll never be healthy.”) Other days, it spurs me to go work out, but exercise motivated by self-hatred is dangerous. It’s the kind of exercise that doesn’t listen to the body’s needs and limitations, or acknowledge that bodies have different shapes and respond to exercise differently. It’s the kind of exercise that pushes past the body’s warning signals and causes its own damage.
I think a lot of people grow up internalizing some view of self as being bad, defective, broken, or unworthy in some way. Advertising capitalizes on these messages to sell us things to fix our myriad problems, even problems that the campaigns create for us so that we’ll want the solutions. The core message is that something’s wrong with you, and you need something external to fix it, except the fix is not permanent and doesn’t make you any different. I see this toxic thread throughout culture. “I feel unlovable, but if that person loves me then I’ll know I’m lovable, but they’ll never love me because I’m unlovable.” (“And even if they do love me, it’s somehow a mistake or I’ve tricked them and one day they’ll know I’m unlovable.”) When we buy into these stories–that I’m broken, unworthy, damaged, or hateful–then our attempts to “improve” may well push those stories deeper.
Light sculpture, Nils Rigbers, Luminale 2012
The ways we regulate our systems looks different when coming from a place of control or condemnation. As a society, the United States is being forced to reckon with the consequences of its system of policing and imprisonment, which focuses on controlling and punishing criminals. With this attitude, it makes sense to allow officers largely unregulated authority to use force to subdue and incarcerate people. The result is that the police are allowed to become increasingly militarized and free of accountability for their decisions. I am not personally in favor of this approach, but I can see why police officers might feel angry about the backlash against them for doing their jobs in this way.
Contrast this with a social worker, whose job it is to promote a desired society and might look at the same person, the “criminal,” through a different lens. Instead of seeing a need to control, the social worker might see a person trying to cope with a lack of skills and resources that afford basic dignity and health. There is evidence that punitive measures against social problems like drug addiction are not as effective as approaches that connect the person to social supports and stability. Instead of control, the social worker responds with loving action–the attempt to foster change and improve lives.
All this said, I’m pondering what my life and culture could look like if love was at the center of our practices. As this entry has already gone on long enough, I may return to this later.
This is a week in which it feels hard to think of something positive and uplifting to write. Since I often aim to write with an eye toward illuminating some facet of psychology, even when talking about culture, I’m thinking about how our media representation of stories involving people of color (particularly Black Americans in this post) reveals so much about our own cultural shadows.
Last year in Ferguson and this year in Baltimore, the media and many social media conversations focused on the acts of rioting and violence committed by a fraction of the total people who were out in the communities protesting police violence. Now this fear of uprising has led to martial law and the eradication of civil liberties in Baltimore. As with Ferguson, one of the most noticeable reactions by Whites has been to fixate and condemn the rioting, either through the straight-up racist language of calling Black people “thugs” and “animals” or through the kinder racism of concern that they should be nonviolently resisting, because “violence never solves anything.” Those White people condemning violence are hopefully giving the same amount if not more energy toward condemning the police and government for employing violence against its citizens. Instead, the victims are expected to be somehow more than human, able to tolerate abuse and oppression and rise to nonviolent resistance. And even when the majority of people are resisting nonviolently, somehow these people get blamed for the minority that acts out violently.
As I was thinking about this tendency to fixate on the violence and downplay or ignore the people who did actually practice nonviolent protest, I remembered the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Remember all the stories that made it sound like the place had fallen into an apocalyptic world in which random violence broke out everywhere and people were turning on each other, even shooting rescue helicopters? Did you know those were mostly wrong, or grossly exaggerated?
There is a deep shadow of the collective unconsciousness of the United States, which we project onto those who are socially and politically vulnerable in our society. Popular mythology (the media and politics) ascribes to poor people of color all these qualities of lawlessness and inhumanity and deny their humanity, then we in the dominant culture support systems and organizations that penalize and control these people with violence and economic degradation. So the dominant culture accuses welfare recipients of being lazy drug addicts and create policies that are huge wastes of money, testing welfare recipients only to learn that a fraction of recipients actually tested positive for anything. The dominant culture thinks that the anger and grief in the wake of a senseless murder somehow justifies the system that perpetuated the murder.
Those of us who benefit from the status quo and participate in this projection do not see our own monstrous faces looming over the crowds, laughing at the misery of the poor and people of color, saying they deserve it while the policies we support place burden after burden upon them.
I’m not saying everyone on one side is evil and guilty and everyone on the other side is blameless. That’s exactly the opposite of what I mean. Some people commit acts of evil, acts that harm and degrade others, make their lives smaller and meaner and emptier of hope. Sometimes, the evil comes from the acts or inaction of many, a broader system that depersonalizes evil by making it routine and without accountability. The individual cop who kills unarmed citizens is only an extension of a deeper history, a larger shadow, a system that endorses the betrayal of the basic values of life and liberty.
I’ve nothing profound to say but I fear by saying nothing that I am endorsing mass incarceration, martial law, and police brutality. I’d rather listen to the people who are working to make change, who are putting themselves on the line or directly living this unrest and oppression.
“Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he is shocking it by abusing property rights. There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.
A profound judgment of today’s riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, ‘If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.’
The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967
APA’s Annual Convention in Washington, D.C.
I am a fan of the song “Habits (Stay High)” by Tove Lo. In it, I hear a portrait of a person living through the self-harm that comes from emotional avoidance that I’ve written about in earlier entries. The speaker of the song is living in hell. The loss of an important relationship in her life has left deep pain and grief, a grief she avoids through anonymous sex, binge drinking, and eating in the bathtub. In the refrain she repeats a defensive mantra, “I’ve got to stay high all the time / to keep you off my mind.”
What becomes clear in the song is the unwinnable situation the speaker creates for herself. She seems aware that she is living in a “haze” and a series of unsatisfying moments, temporary reprieves from her underlying pain, but she also knows that to become sober means experiencing her loneliness and pain. Unwilling to experience this, she retreats into her escape routs. The unspoken hope fueling this behavior, one might infer, is that if she simply avoids the pain long enough one day she’ll wake up and it’ll be gone. The truth, in my experience and observation, is that her behavior only locks the pain more firmly in place. Detachment from our body and heart’s capacities to experience and process emotion means losing a profound source of understanding and integrity.
My saying this should not be construed as morally condemning the singer of the song or anyone who finds themselves in that situation—a situation that is not at all rare. We do not know the life story of the singer, we do not know how she experienced pain as a child, how her family taught her to recover from or suppress the pain, whether her culture provided validation or condemnation. We do not know what traumas she might have suffered that make her pain even more unbearable.
Melancholy, by Andrew Mason
Our culture does not train us to deal with grief. Our culture of relentless positivity and happiness labels pain as undesirable and celebrates “strong” people who proclaim (or pretend) that they don’t feel vulnerable. If we look back to the singer of “I Will Survive,” we see her willingness to acknowledge her vulnerability before moving into strength: “At first I was afraid / I was petrified.” This is a strength of integrity, accepting herself as she is. The singer of Habits is pure vulnerability unable to accept her strength, her capacity to feel. She is the shadow of the “I won’t even miss you” singer in songs like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable”: “Baby I won’t shed a tear for you / I won’t lose a wink of sleep.”*
Several people responding to the video on YouTube seem to think that “young people”—who are often invoked as people somehow more susceptible to the imprint of a pop song than the culture of their families and communities—will listen to this song and take it as an instructional video for how to deal with problematic emotions. I like this song because it is honest, because it speaks to something in the heart and in our communities that is uncomfortable to acknowledge. It’s easy to dismiss and criticize the person who made the song and much harder to wonder how we might support the people in our lives who are living that song—or look at the ways we stay high to avoid pain. Having compassion for a person’s suffering is not the same as agreeing with or accepting their self-harming coping strategies. This is the kind of art that provides an opportunity for connection and recognition, for someone suffering to realize they’re not alone in this.
* Of course I had to mention Beyoncé.
I am on vacation and will likely not produce an article for next week.
Revolutionaries are sexier than revolutions. We know their images, their hand-selected quotes, the steady curation of image that comes particularly when the revolutionary and their revolution is no longer a threat to the modern-day. Though their ideas and images continue to live, the dominant culture tends to take what is most palatable and discard the rest—unless the revolutionary serves a better purpose as the villain, in which case the culture takes what is most disturbing and elides the pointed critique.
Parthenon, by Thermos
There’s something magnetic about the marriage of the idealized vision and deep, transformative passion. The eyes inspire love or hatred, devotion or utter opposition. That depth of passion creeps through all that is joyous and heavy, loving and ferocious, creeping into the most crooked and unsettling parts of the human heart and brings it into service of the grand vision, the dream of a better society, a better life, a more egalitarian world. With this ferocity of dedication, all manner of ills suddenly seem all too easy to rationalize and use. Intoxicated by this passion, we see revolutions that become even more repressive than the tyrannies overthrown—the suppression of religion, free thought, the removal of liberties and “decadent” cultures.
When faced with the possibility of change, often the emotional parts of us that want safety and stability will push back hard, to clamp down, to become ferocious and punitive. Our systems of protection, feeling under attack, permit themselves to push back harder, crack down more fiercely, take on heavier firepower. Suddenly a simple disagreement becomes an ideological battle in which lines must be drawn and people must swear allegiance. We forget that our ideals are always and ever imaginary visions to which we aspire and cannot be effective laws to rule a species so diverse and contentious as humanity. Something will always rebel under the yoke of such legislation.
The heart of fervor could also allow room for the heart of deep love and compassion for the beauty and weakness of fellow humans. When this heart comes into contact with pure intellectual vision, those sterile guidelines can begin to relax. Instead of demanding our fellow humans adhere to a standard of morality that is devoid of humanity, we can bring those grand visions and ideals into an experimental practice. We can strive for equality while recognizing the inescapable tendency toward hierarchy. We can admit that our new ways of thinking and acting must by necessity overturn someone else’s world, a world that to them was perfectly suited to their nature—or at the very least, their nature had come to fit the world. We can recognize the distress of the privileged when it arises to meet the changes we push to see in our lives, our relationships, our civic communities. Change is coming, and for some it will be painful and arduous, while others might find themselves more free, more empowered.
A while ago, my uncle loaned me the book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. It took me a while to sit down and read it, but seeing ads for the movie reminded me that it was on my list. In the past few weeks, I’ve read it with increasing interest. (Some spoilers to come.) A significant portion of the book details the brutal treatment and torture POWs received while imprisoned by the Japanese. As I read about the abuse, neglect, and psychological torment suffered by people who needed compassion and care, I felt myself getting angry. The most reactive part of me wanted to direct my anger simplistically, against the Japanese soldiers who tortured, to make them into bad people.
The irony, of course, is that I was reading this only a day after the release of the CIA torture report. Having only heard about in the news, I realized I now needed to sit down and begin to read through it, slowly. And I discovered what I already suspected: the horror inflicted upon these people I’d grown to care about in a book, my country had inflicted upon others in our names. It seems cliché but nevertheless necessary to note that the way the US’s enemies in WWI were able to dehumanize and degrade their POWs is the same way that the US’s people were able to dehumanize and degrade their prisoners, both sides justifying it as somehow for the greater good of their cause. One of the key differences is that Japan lost, and history was written by the victors, while the US continues to lumber forward with a defiant belief in its own unspoiled goodness.
Inside Alcatraz, by Daniel Ramirez
When I was a kid, I thought American ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality were meaningful values that held our country together. As a white male Midwesterner, I was not exposed to the ugly realities of inequality and oppression that other kids had to experience early. I was lucky. Eventually, I started to hear weird stories, like how the CIA had supported coups and revolutions in different countries and set up puppet dictators who ruled tyrannically, but it didn’t matter to the USA because the rulers deferred to us. At first I thought these were lies or taboo secrets that no one else knew. I encountered them often enough to be convinced that they were true, but still I could not fathom how my country would allow these things to happen. If people only knew!
As I became older, I learned that not only were these stories not lies, they weren’t even really secrets. A number of citizens of the USA felt these were completely legitimate uses of force to promote our interests. This is the same thread of culture that today justifies our torture because “Americans need to be protected,” who say that the police should not be criticized for killing unarmed civilians over petty crimes because they have hard jobs and need to “protect us.” This is the thread of culture that says that the values of equality, democracy, and freedom are less important than personal safety, secure property, and maintenance of our “way of life.” And then it’s the same thread of culture that denies privilege—and of course it has to deny privilege, because these systems of brutality exist to create that privilege.
As a therapist, I believe it is healing and liberating to really see and know one’s own shadow. Not only believe, I have experienced this, I have witnessed this. It takes time and sometimes major crises to awaken to our own shadow. We need the courage and willingness to look at our shadows, our cultural shadows, our national shadow. We need to look at how our personal freedom has come at the cost of the liberty of others, not as a historical accident or passing moment but throughout the history of our country to today. We need to look at how we treat those we consider our enemies or those considered the worst among us.
There’s a Batman graphic novel called The Killing Joke, in which the Joker kidnaps and brutally tortures Commissioner Jim Gordon. The Joker’s agenda, it seems, is to demonstrate how easy it is to drive a person insane and cause them to betray their own values. Once Commissioner Gordon is rescued, he demands that Batman bring the Joker in “by the book.” “We need to show him that our way works!” This character could be the part of us with unflinching integrity, who knows our deep values and urges us to rise to our integrity no matter what.
This is the part we’re missing when we say, “He shouldn’t have talked back to the cops!” to justify an unarmed person being shot or choked to death over a petty crime, or often no crime at all.
This is the part we’re missing when we say, “This is what they have to do to protect our freedom and way of life,” without reflecting deeply on whether our way of life is worth this stain on our souls.
I know in my own heart is the same capacity for fear, anger, and evil. I know there is a desire for safety and security and a fear of confronting the roots of that security. Because I know this, and accept this, I can bring this into confrontation with that within me that aspires to integrity, to a moral investment in personal liberty, autonomy, and compassion. There are no simple answers, and our desire for a simple answer brings us back into the same danger of dehumanization for the sake of our own comfort.
Let’s breathe together, and remember our humanity.
The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.
– Hafiz
Last night, I had a dream that I was put in jail. A group of us sat at a table while the white male in charge of our jailing walked around, threatening us, insulting us. In the dream I had visions of myself or others lashing out against him violently, cruelly, all the while knowing that any kind of retaliation would only make our jailing worse. No matter what we did to the man in charge of the jail, he was the one with power and could do far worse to us.
My heart hurts for the people of Ferguson and the family of Mike Brown, and the families of all young Black people killed or incarcerated by a system that disproportionately targets and polices their communities. My heart hurts for the damage caused to these communities by the militarized police responses to protesting we as a nation witnessed, and will continue to witness if things are allowed to continue. My heart hurts for the peaceful protestors whose message can be more easily dismissed because some erupted into violence—knowing that even the most peaceful protest could still have its message dismissed.
I do not support rioting, but I want to pause and think about how even this behavior comes out of systems of racial injustice. In my work with formerly incarcerated people and people with criminal justice charges, I met with a young person who told me, “Everyone already sees me as a criminal, so why don’t I just go ahead and be a criminal?” For many Black Americans last night, the failure to indict sends yet another message that the system sees them as criminal, does not value their lives and well-being. I think of my dream, how we became violent because we had no other recourse. When nonviolent protesting and the grand jury system are not enough for justice, what is left?
I think as a country we should be very concerned about the police practices of escalation and using violence to control our citizens. I think as a country we should be concerned when police are not held accountable. If police are not held accountable for the violence they cause then they are, in effect, being turned into a separate class of people who may commit violence with impunity. That is why this is more concerning to me than so-called “black-on-black” crime or interpersonal crimes in which a white person is a victim of violence than a black person. Those act are already illegal and we have systems of accountability and justice in place. We need those systems in turn to be accountable and just.
There are people sleeping outside in the cold and the rain. There are systemic, economic, cultural, and personal reasons for this reality, but in almost every large population this is happening. Someone gets excluded and needs to survive at the edges of others’ privilege. They knock, ask, and demand and get shut out. When I worked as a barista, I would pass them at 5 in the morning as I was walking to work—sheltering under whatever awnings were available, clustered together within a temporary fortress of boxes until someone came along and told them to leave. My next job has been, in part, to help these people find places to sleep, and I tell you the pickings are slim if you have no income, and even with a small income, the waitlists are long.
People who do not sleep on the streets do not always see what it’s like for a person to be homeless and poor every day. We see people begging or cajoling for money, eliciting whatever emotion works to get resources: humor, intimidation, pity. We barely see them if we can avoid it. Instead of providing funding for the housing that’s needed, our communities tend to make being poor and homeless a criminal act, punishable by cycling in and out of jail and back out to the streets without a job, without a place to sleep, with mounting legal debts that are unpayable.
Being poor and homeless is full-time work. For those trying to pull their way out of their condition, they constantly cycle between appointments and filling out paperwork. And waiting. Killing time. Finding community wherever it is. Most of us do not see this hustling and harassment, we only see what appears to be a life of indolence because this person is sitting on the street, doing things to get money. We feel superior because we are on our way to jobs where we sit or stand for hours, doing things to get money. For some, the poor and homeless are scary because we fear the harm they might cause, not recognizing how their harms can only be personal where we have access to systemic harms. This person can steal your wallet and the city can install fencing and spikes so that there is nowhere comfortable to sleep, and it does so in your name.
The people who sleep on the streets are neither angels nor demons, but neither are we. We’re all inheritors of the same tangled human heart. Within us are the exiled people, the parts of us that we find offensive or ugly, who remind us of truths we’d rather ignore because they are too unsettling. Somewhere within each of us, something scrabbles for survival, something dwells only on its immediate pains and pleasures and cares nothing for the suffering of others. Each person’s pain is the largest pain they can carry, no matter what privilege supports them.
Generosity is what expands our capacity to hold pain and care at the same time. Generosity can begin by simply being real and confronting the truth of the moment. Instead of turning away from the uncomfortable reality, turning toward it, truly looking at it. Finding what is human that dwells beneath years of pain and trauma and making what offering is possible in the moment. Not giving into manipulation and scams, but offering what is truly needed and what you are capable of offering.
Some folks who highly value monogamy tend to insult or pathologize non-monogamous relationships. Arguments include that non-monogamy exposes the people involved to higher risks of sexually transmitted infections and romantic infidelities, or are inherently unstable. Some folks who highly value non-monogamy tend to insult or pathologize monogamous relationships, saying that those within the relationships are somehow stuck in a rigid moral code that is unhealthy and retrograde, or only do so out of fear and blind adherence to religious and social codes.
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Being poor and homeless is full-time work. For those trying to pull their way out of their condition, they constantly cycle between appointments and filling out paperwork. And waiting. Killing time. Finding community wherever it is. Most of us do not see this hustling and harassment, we only see what appears to be a life of indolence because this person is sitting on the street, doing things to get money. We feel superior because we are on our way to jobs where we sit or stand for hours, doing things to get money. For some, the poor and homeless are scary because we fear the harm they might cause, not recognizing how their harms can only be personal where we have access to systemic harms. This person can steal your wallet and the city can install fencing and spikes so that there is nowhere comfortable to sleep, and it does so in your name.