Refusing the inhumane.

Last night, ringing choruses echoed in my dreams:

GEORGE FLOYD

SAY HIS NAME

1, 2, 3, 4,

5, 6, 7, 8,

9, 10, 11

FUCK 12

Sixteen shots and a cover-up!

What?!

Sixteen shots and a cover-up!

What?!

BLACK
LIVES
MATTER

The people, united,

Will never be divided!

The people, united,

Will never be divided!

Upon waking, I spoke to my therapist about the feeling of empowerment and unity that follows showing up and making dissent public. I am heartened to see global outcry demonstrating that police brutality is not the will of the people, that police brutality is not sovereign.

Taking over the street and shutting shit down has an energizing feeling of agency. Coming together under the banner of caring and mutual feeling is not only a psychic balm, but a necessary good. It confirms to us our outrage and heartbreak is legitimate and we will not tolerate it. If business were to go on as usual, if indifference had been the song of the week, that would have been a heartbreaking, insidious gaslight to the truth we know in our hearts. Thankfully, that is not the case.

If you’ve ever shown up, you know the anarchistic beauty of people taking turns leading chants when another voice gets raspy, the communal cathartic expression of grief and anger, the pulsating physicality of marching together and blazing down street after street, linking neighborhood to neighborhood in a city as segregated as Chicago, and the liberating suspension of normal in favor of a different organizing principle of sociality. Protests are meaningful and functional for a number of reasons untethered to the outcome of their demands: they make dissent public, they demonstrate the power and the will of the people, they connect people and efforts, they birth new social bodies, and they are one of the few outlets we have for collective mourning.

I’ve been thinking a lot about violence in the aftermath of yet another tragedy. I normally avoid viewing videos of racial violence and am sensitive to the criticism that the footage can function like modern day lynching post-cards. But this time I felt an intuitive call to watch the George Floyd video, I felt a need to not turn away. I had to take in the full reality of what I am privileged enough to be able to ignore if I choose. It churned my stomach and I still feel ill, desperately helpless, inflamed with urgency, sodden with complicity, and burning with a dire need to take action.

We cannot know what Chauven was feeling or thinking at the time, but we can observe him. The officer looked to be in a trance state. How could he stand on the neck of a human being crying out for a full 8 minutes and 45 seconds. I implore you to set a timer and sit in silence for that amount of time and really feel this duration. For 8 minutes and 45 seconds, Chauven felt the softness and warmth of Floyd’s body, felt the heaving of Floyd struggle to breathe, and yet, he stood on this man’s neck as if he wasn’t a human. And his fellow officers stood by. In the videos we have, Chauven’s face appears disturbingly, eerily blank and immovable, as if he was in some kind of psychological altered state, not only in cold disconnection from Floyd’s humanity, coldly disconnected from his own body, his own emotions, his own beating heart.

Evil isn’t about rage. It’s about a machine-like obliteration of the humane.

After seeing the video, the mind reels in trying to understand how a person could commit such an atrocity. But we cannot disavow that under the right circumstances we all have a tendency toward violence. I have been questioning where violence is born, with the hope that we might be able to limit it if we get at its earliest tendencies. What occurs to me is the profound effect of othering and separation that cuts us off spiritually at the heart. This happens when we fearfully and defensively close our hearts and refuse to listen empathically. But it also can occur internally, when when deny our experience and suppress our own tenderest emotions.

The culture of the US is steeped violence. Its the history of the nation and it runs right down to the psychic level. The embedded circuitry of fear, the inequality, the tense and competitive social environment, and the lack of emotional regulation skills keep even the most privileged on edge. As a country, we are a profoundly aching, materially obsessed, and spiritually bankrupt people. And hurting people hurt people. Being violated disrupts our integrity and continuity. If not adequately healed, this harm fractures our wholeness and our connection to our fullest selves. It disrupts our belief that safety with others is possible, and with that belief, things quickly devolve into maim or be maimed, kill or be killed. Add on top of that distorted and racist separations of self from “other,” and we have the recipe for the unthinkable.

Maybe it behooves us to conceive of violence as a spectrum and take inventory of where we might be sliding down that scale in subtle ways. My provisional conception of the violence spectrum might begin with a momentary disconnection from the truth of one’s own full experience and increase with accumulated dismissals of the truth of other’s experience. Continual emotional neglect would form a sustained pattern of indifference to parts of self and others, culminating with generalized, sustained indifference, sociopathy, and a murderous split self. Another, simpler way of looking at this spectrum could be COLD vs WARMTH, or heart-centered vs heart-disconnected. There is a reason why we describe killing “in cold blood” and we describe people who are authentic, welcoming, and accepting as exuding “warmth.” Warmth describes a non-fearful relation and acceptance of the other. It denotes a kind of compassionate love, a willingness to fully honor another person’s right to exist without fear that their experience and existence invalidates or threatens our own.

The courageous Elie Wiesel said that the the opposite of love isn’t hatred, but indifference. I agree. We may erroneously equate evil with emotions like hatred and rage. It seems to me that hatred has little to do with an intensity of emotion and more to do with the degree of separation from one’s humanity. Evil is a denial, a distancing, a disavowal and a rejection of shared human vulnerability. Hatred is the psyche defensively rejecting what causes it to feel threatened, and in cases of self-hatred, one aspect of the self is split off and rejected. We all do this to varying degrees. It’s functional. Splitting defends against what is felt to be an impending loss of self. Whether the felt reality corresponds to actuality has everything to do with one’s relationship to safety, trust, and social cohesion.

I don’t believe that an integrated psyche is capable of cold-blooded murder. In the process of playing a zero sum game and making the other “other” through fear and hatred, we end up foreclosing our own humanity. On a deep level, the soul knows the truth that we are interconnected. Put in a different way, humans are social creatures, and to be indifferent or harmful towards others does not produce a feeling of connection and safety. Doing harm creates cognitive dissonance, and cognitive dissonance insidiously eats away at our integrity, causing us to feel uncomfortable, troubled, or just “off,” even if only registered on an unconscious level.

It follows that human well-being is a state of non-separation from self and others. This non-separation requires a feeling of trust and safety, and feeling that one can freely be exactly what one is without the need to change, hide, or repress. True love is non-separation, taking the well-being of another as your own, without fear.

We might imagine that Officer Chauven felt existentially threatened due to numerous factors including but not limited to: his ingrained racist beliefs that black people are dangerous, repeated exposure to life threatening and violent situations in his career as a police officer, and the defensive mindset of the police and therefore their constant activation of fight or flight mode. Perhaps in his mind George Floyd represented something so multivalent and “other” that he could completely disconnect from Floyd’s humanity and kill him in broad daylight. I take the time to inquire into Chauven’s mind state not to apologize for or validate the actions, but because if we want to understand how to stop these things from occurring, we have to be willing to look under the hood, and how we might share some of these tendencies or beliefs. How we might plug our ears when the conversations get uncomfortable.

We can see echoes of the a same mentalities that led Officer Chauven to kill George Floyd in the behavior of officers at the protests. There is a a kind of “us vs them,” zero sum game, “kill or be killed” mentality. Many of us have seen firsthand the way police are the ones who instigate violence at public protests. If you have not, I encourage you to diversify your media coverage and look at more footage. Without adequate provocation or threat, we have seen police shooting indiscriminately into crowds, blinding people with rubber bullets, and running over civilians with their cars (and backing up to do it again). There are also several reports of undercover officers posing as protesters and instigating violent behavior with the assumed intent of fomenting mainstream dismissal of these largely peaceful protests. And it’s important to acknowledge that demands of “peaceful” protesting have been weaponized. The police know that their way of being is under threat, and they are in attack mode. This means that public demonstration is not safe, and no matter your views, we should all take that very seriously in regards to any semblance of democratic freedom we might have in the US.

So, how can we commit to non-violence? At a fundamental feel, it means honoring the validity of our feelings by developing a kind and attuned witnessing practice. Trying to describe the bodily sensations of emotions is a great start. Therapy and vipassana meditation are other excellent tools. I’m enjoying reading up on nonviolent communication and practicing the art of empathic listening with my self and others. There is so much work to be done, and yet many of us are afraid to speak for fear of saying the wrong thing, fearing the attack dogs of the internet coming after us. But we cannot process and repair our world in silos. We cannot repair by becoming police of language, but we can implement non-violent communication in our interactions and behave as if there’s a living, breathing, deeply feeling human at the other end of the mirror, table, phone, or computer screen.

Evil isn’t about rage. It’s about a machine-like obliteration of the humane.

The people are demanding that the brutality end NOW. That the actions of the police are not sanctioned by the will of the people, and that we say NO, we won’t be complicit to violence with indifference.

On a deep level, the police know the people have the power. The police know they are ultimately at the mercy of the public scrutinizing their legitimacy. If they gave an inch it would mean acknowledging the truth that they are built on rotten foundations. This explains the fear in their eyes. The mass of our collective bodies in the street, demanding accountability, terrifies them.

It is my conviction that there is no possibility of reform. What is needed is to defund and dismantle. We need to begin anew with a different imagination of what the protection of people would mean. Something like an end to massive economic precarity. Something like community-centered transformative justice. Something like accessible and adequate health care, both of body and mind. Something like meaningful work for all, and not just livable but thrive-able wages. Something like real, public accountability for abuses of power. Something like freeing the millions of people in privately profitable prisons and detention centers. Something like teams of rigorously well-trained and vetted mediation and crisis counselors as our first responders. It is an abomination that the police are often the first entity called when people are suffering with a mental health crisis. It is an abomination that our only public recourse to dispute, discomfort, or conflict is often to “call the police” — we as a society can and should do better. Our survival depends on it.

The rot of the carceral state, the rot of white suprematist, carceral capitalism and extractionist practices on the backs of the poorest in this country has to be rooted out and burned. We are witnessing a failed social experiment. The origins of the US are deeply violent, from the slaughter of and theft from millions of indigenous peoples, to slavery, to internment camps, to Jim Crow, to war profiteering and our current state of techno-fascist corporate power and control propped up with state-wielded violence.

The pursuit of private gain over collective human flourishing rages on. But we’ll rage back.

I should really only speak for myself. I am tasked with personal responsibility at this juncture. I cannot callous myself against the reality that I am complicit everyday this continues.

I return again and again to Dr. King’s insistence to “love your enemy” — see, it wasn’t just a spiritual orientation, it was profoundly pragmatic. Look at your enemy squarely, then look in the mirror. See your enemy as not different from yourself. Loving your enemy is the only way to pull violence out at the roots. Loving your enemy does not mean to agree, it means a refusal to become inhumane. Its choosing stand up to injustice wherever it is found. And to stand up lovingly, without losing sight that to harm another is to harm yourself. It means refusing to use dehumanizing language in the way we speak to ourselves and others. It means seeking understanding, seeking wholeness and repair in the social fabric. Unity starts within and radiates outward.

Be so kind to yourself. Let’s build a world where we can ALL breathe.

SAY THEIR NAMES

George Floyd
Ahmaud Arbery
Aiyana Stanley-Jones
Alton Sterling
Amadou Diallo
Atatiana Jefferson
Botham Jean
Breonna Taylor
Claude Reese
Clifford Glover
Corey Jones
Darnisha Harris
Eric Garner
Freddie Gray
John Crawford
Jonathan Ferrell
Jordan Edwards
Kathryn Johnston
Keith Scott
Kendra James
Korryn Gaines
Mike Brown
Malissa Williams
Nina Pop
Oscar Grant
Pamela Turner
Philando Castile
Randolph Evans
Rekia Boyd
Samuel DuBose
Sandra Bland
Sean Bell
Shantel Davis
Shelley Frey
Stephon Clark
Tamir Rice
Tarika Wilson
Terrence Crutcher
Tony McDade
Tyisha Miller
Walter Scott
Yvonne Smallwood
And so many more known and unknown.

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Nadia InannaJune 1, 2020