Racism leaves you in chains

So, it’s not news that the world is on fire, seemingly all around us right now. We’re living through a worldwide pandemic, and during a time when people seem to be more divided than ever about what’s right and what’s wrong. Most of us are firmly planted in our camps, and unwilling to budge. 

We all occupy a space on the spectrum of privilege, and that space often blinds us to the pain and suffering of others. Many of us mistake the use of the word “privilege” to mean that others believe we have it easy, and that we haven’t ever gone through tough times. The way we feel about our positions on the spectrum is greatly influenced by what came before us, and what we haven’t been able to leave behind. 

I have spoken many times about growing up in a home dominated by domestic violence and many kinds of abuse. Anyone who has read or studied domestic violence knows that it is often cyclical—meaning it impacts multiple generations of a family. I know that to be the case in my own family, on both my mother’s side, and my stepfather’s side. Oftentimes, when a generation—a person—doesn’t follow that pattern, we call it “breaking the cycle.” I was the person in my family. I broke the cycle. 

In the cycle of domestic violence, no one could argue that breaking the cycle isn’t the same thing as setting oneself free. I am proud to be the first “free woman” in my family. I also know that the way I look at the world around me, and the way I speak and behave are forever impacted by existing within that cycle, and breaking free from it. 

I can’t completely explain why I was able to get out. The deck was stacked against me. Long term abuse conditions us to believe things about ourselves, relationships, and others that aren’t true. Still, even though I believed many things about myself that weren’t and aren’t true, I never believed that the existence I was in was right. I knew what was happening to my mother, my sister and me was wrong, and I knew it should never happen to anyone. 

Domestic violence isn’t the only cycle within our families that can be broken, and that can give us a more clear picture of the world, while opening doors to greater openness and love for everyone around us. 

I was sewing over the weekend, listening to U2, and thinking about how many people complain that their old music is the only thing of value from them, and that they “sold out.” I am an ardent fan, and I disagree. I started thinking about why their music changed, and one thing struck me—they got out of their “bubble.” They were four guys growing up in working class Dublin during a tough time politically. They knew there was something better for them, and somehow, they broke out. Their music took them to places they had never been. They met people and came into contact with cultures they may never have otherwise encountered. 

Experience, and getting out of your bubble influences you and often changes who you are. It changes what you put out into the world. I use U2, merely as an example, because a friend of mine experienced something over the weekend that is so frustrating and so difficult to understand, but I think it happened because of another person’s bubble. 

Breaking some cycles changes the world. 

A lot of white people—even good ones are racist. There’s no other way to say it. They just are. There’s no justification for it. At the same time, I don’t think many of them could give you an explanation of where their thinking came from or how they “decided” to think that way. I know every person’s situation is different, but as I had already been thinking about what makes a person break out of cyclical violence, or what makes a band’s music evolve, I also began to think about what doesn’t make these things happen—about what doesn’t make people change. 

I know issues around systemic racism are complex, but at their core is a simple thought—the thought of being superior to another person because of skin color. It’s a hateful thought, but boiled down, it’s still simple. 

Why is it so often that racist people don’t change their thinking, and pass their beliefs down—like violence—to subsequent generations? I probably don’t have the answer, but one thing strikes me about people who don’t change—they never get away from their bubble. They not only stay in their bubble, but they shun any challenge from others that they have allowed themselves to live their lives trapped by it. They are fine with being trapped, and living a sliver of the life that is available to them, and they often apply this to every aspect of their lives. 

I would argue that people who never change the way they think or live are some of the most unhappy, and often unpleasant people you ever encounter, and they are depriving themselves and, in many cases, those close to them a world of possibilities. I have never met a happy racist. I’m sure they’re probably out there, but I suspect they live on a higher point of the pay grid than most, and there’s a more significant benefit from their racism than the racism of your curmudgeonly uncle, father or grandfather. Obviously, being racist is not gender exclusive, but when we think of the hallmark racist, it’s almost always a vision of the angry, white man—and often an older angry, white man. 

We all know them. They have a very narrow range of interests, and anything outside of that range is pointless for them. They don’t want to go places that will challenge them socially, culturally, or intellectually. They need to control their environment, often needing to “take” their comfort zones with them. They hold onto thinking and ideas that were passed to them, and they have held on so tightly, they don’t even ealize that these thoughts don’t even come from themselves—they’re just carrying the unsorted baggage given to them by previous generations. The baggage isn’t independent thought, and it’s actually evidence of an insecurity that if ever acknowledged, would be both frightening and depressing. 

If you had been carrying someone else’s incorrect and unsubstantiated beliefs your entire life, and you were suddenly forced to confront and accept that reality about yourself, I would think you would wonder what more you could have done in your life. What could you have done? Could you have gone places and seen things that would have made your life more fun? Could you have done that for someone you love? Could you have connected with someone you love who thinks differently from you, instead of pushing them away? 

My grandpa was a hardcore union card-holding Democrat all of his life. He was also one of the most racist people I ever knew. He only wanted to watch sports on television—nothing else. The deepest connection that ever existed in his life was to his parents, and that connection influenced every aspect of his life—what he loved to eat, how he spoke, and what he thought. He moved away from the small gulf town in Texas where he grew up, but he never left his bubble. He had no use for anything in which he wasn’t personally interested, and those interests were very limited. I hated the fact that he was racist. I loved him. He was capable of immense love and caring, and he lived a life of anger and pain—not all of which was his own making. I often wonder, if he had chosen to get out of his bubble, could he have chosen a life that didn’t leave him in pain and in desperate loneliness that drove him to drink away the last years of his life? 

If you never get away from what and where you come from, one thing will happen: you’ll never really go anywhere. If you hold onto thoughts given to you by people who also didn’t have their own thoughts, how can you even say that you believe your life is all your own? 

Racism is a thought. Many people carry it around with them, and they don’t even know why they think it. They’ve allowed themselves to stay trapped in beliefs that don’t make any sense. They’ve locked out the possibility that they’ve been lied to, and they have perpetuated that lie with no purpose. Sadly, they often don’t even understand how hurtful and hateful those beliefs are. 

I often believe that our best hope of overcoming racism is that the people carrying it—almost like a chronic disease—will eventually die off, and the disease will die off with them. I know that’s not entirely likely, and I know that we have to keep battling. Sometimes, that means standing up to people we love and telling them they’re wrong, and that we are going to remove ourselves from their presence if they cannot remove their racism from our interactions with them. It’s painful. It takes courage. It takes strength of character. But those things are nothing compared to what people of color suffer every day in America. When we break out of the bubble in which we are raised—whether a bubble of abuse, or a bubble of racist baggage—we owe it to ourselves and to future generations not to go back, and not to pretend that bubble is harmless. 

We can’t always change people. We can’t always change their wrong thoughts. We can’t always make them understand that the beliefs they hold onto are chains, and they have prevented them from forming beliefs and ideas of their own. You can’t be a complete person or live a complete life when you are chained to a cycle that holds you back, and holds you down. Those chains are probably even part of the reason you remain unhappy, even when no one you think you hate has ever done you any wrong. 

America: An incomplete history

So, I am way behind the popular culture times. That’s what happens when you move from a city to a small town, have a child and become a stay-at-home mom. I don’t often get out to do things like see Broadway musicals, giant concerts or other significant cultural events. I wait for most movies to come out on cable, and then, I only get to watch bits at a time. Sometimes, I only know things are important because I see people I value embracing them. Sometimes, I only know there’s a story worth “reading” because people I love value it. 

That’s the case with the musical “Hamilton.” 

Just as it was getting ready to open, I watched a story about its inception on “CBS Sunday Morning.” I wasn’t sure it was for me, but because it was such a new take on where we were as a nation more than 200 years ago, I knew it was going to be important. It was a new way of telling America’s story, and of course, Alexander Hamilton’s story. It became a runaway hit and a cultural phenomenon. 

I didn’t get to see it until today, so I had intentionally avoided listening to any of the music because I didn’t want to hear it out of its intended context. Stories are important to me. Music is important to me. And music tied to stories can’t live separate from each other until you have had the chance to hold  them together in your heart. It’s just how I am.

“Hamilton” struck a chord for so many when it opened on Broadway, but for me—seeing it the first time in my living room—it struck a chord I may not have seen before. Or at least It wouldn’t have struck me the same way. 

I am one of the whitest people on the planet. I understand my privilege, and I treat it a little like an alcoholic who needs meetings. I’m never going to be free of the burden of my privilege until we somehow find a way to crush it. Until then, I am forever going to be in an accountable state of learning, and trying to crush my unintentional tethers to it. 

As one of the whitest people on the planet, I have to understand that I was raised in a manner that may not have been overtly racist, but was also not overtly inclusive or open. Music is a lifeblood for me, but even though I like many different genres of music, there is one way in which my scope is decidedly narrow. I didn’t hear any black voices on my parents’ stereo or on their car radios. My universe of music was starkly white, and it still is. The reason that matters is because I understand that the story of all of the music I do love couldn’t be told without the voices in the music I never really heard. There are characters missing from the story—vital ones. 

Pixabay Image

The story of our American independence is forever being written and rewritten, but there are parts of it that remain static—parts of it we all know. Everyone knows how the Revolutionary War turned out, so it’s not really spoiling anything when I say that the scene in “Hamilton” where we win really impacted me in an unexpected way. 

The men—the white men—who declared our independence and hammered out our democracy have always been accepted as great men, because we view them from an exclusively idealistic vantage point. We grow up being taught they were great men, and we believe that story, because their names are on the papers, their names are in the books, their artifacts are in museums, and their existence is memorialized, sanitized, white washed, and polished. It’s true that their names being white washed doesn’t change many of the ideals they may have thought they were striving for. If not for them, we would probably be living very differently. But the truth is, we don’t always get their complete stories. We don’t get the flaws, the misdeeds, the ignorance, the mistakes, and the atrocities that also belong in their stories. 

The part of the story we don’t understand is that having great ideas doesn’t necessarily make the people who have them great. We foist greatness onto people not because they are profoundly good, but solely because of their shining moments—their great ideas. We disconnect all of their other moments from those ideas, and we scrap everything else. 

In third or fourth grade, I had to do two research papers about two of our presidents. My assignments were Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. I think my only sources were encyclopedias from the school library. It’s been almost 40 years, so my memory of the instructions are hazy, but I distinctly remember that I wasn’t asked to write about anything bad or boring about either of these men. Thomas Jefferson being a slave owner, and Andrew Jackson being a genocidal psychopath never came up. I wrote about Thomas Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence, and Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British in the War of 1812. 

I didn’t know I wasn’t reading their whole stories. 

Back to “Hamilton.”

As I sat watching George Washington and his troops turn the world “upside down,” I felt something so unexpected. I felt a grief that drove me to tears. Out of nowhere only one thought occurred to me as I watched so many cast members of color breathing life into this history—our history. What about their stories? What about the stories we will never get to see on a Broadway stage, in a book, or in a movie? What about the black lives and people of color who were sacrificed for this dream—for our nation? What about their stories? Who were the black men who helped us fight for our independence, not knowing if they would ever share in it? Who were the black men and women whose blood our freedom is built upon—every bit as much as the blood of Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson? Who lives, who dies—who tells their stories? 

And from then until now, there are so many of those untold stories.

I believe in our universe we find ourselves at crossroads over time. We find ourselves at a fork in the road, and our choices either change everything, or keep us in perpetual traction. I don’t know why the time is now that after 400 years of systemic racism and oppression we find ourselves at a crossroads again—the same one where we must decide to either change everything and build what the idealism in those deeply flawed great men may have intended, or continue to give lip-service to their words and allow the word “equality” to remain meaningless verbiage in a system that could have been the example instead of a failure. 

When I say these things, it may seem like I don’t love my country. I don’t have a defense against that perspective. I’m not built for forced or contrived allegiances to anything. I love the idea of my country. I love the promise of my country. I understand terrible mistakes and grievous atrocities have been made all over the map and all over the timeline. But I am only responsible and accountable for what happens in my own place and my own time, and the only allegiance I accept is to being on the right side of history—the right side of this story. 

And our story is incomplete. Our history is buried in the regalia of time, propaganda, wishes, and unfulfilled promises. The stories we know about our black brothers and sisters are separated from our real history, and that is at least part of why our story is incomplete and our promise is unfulfilled. Yes, we have Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr,  and Malcolm X. But what about all of the others we won’t know? 

We have had so many chances to complete our history and fulfill our promise. There have been marches. There have been sit-ins. There has been a president singing “Amazing Grace” in grief over a perpetual divide manifested, once again, by bloodshed. There have been lives taken for no other reason than white versus black. There have been, and are Americans calling for the completion of a chapter that has gone on for too many pages. There have been courageous black men respectfully kneeling to remind us that some pages of our story still tell of sanctioned violence and oppression that happen, even today. There are voices speaking on behalf of the stories we will never hear demanding that we live up to our promise. 

Who lives? Who dies? What will it finally take for us to understand and tell our whole story? What will it take for us to be willing to erase the lies, accept the truth, write it down, and then pick up the pen and write the first page of a new promise that includes all of the stories? 

Until all of those stories are told—until every word, every character, every life we have not lifted up in fulfillment of our own promise matters—our history and our nation will be a work of fiction. 

The story behind the fires

The world felt pretty awful in so many ways before last Monday. We’re in the middle of a pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 Americans and infected more than a million. Millions of Americans are unemployed and desperately wondering how long they can hold on without the help they need. And so many Americans have been working because they have little choice. 

It’s like the whole world has just stopped—except some things didn’t.

In a very short period of time, the murder of three black Americans has reminded us that racism never takes a break. And one of those murders was so brutal—so heinous—that many of us were stunned. One of those murders was captured by a cellphone camera, and it was perpetrated by a white police officer.

We’ve held the match over the tinderbox. 

The video of a black man being pinned to the ground with a white police officer’s knee on his neck until the man lost consciousness and subsequently died has left many of us asking how this kind of act can be happening in 2020.

Sadly, the “many of us” asking the question are white, because for 400 years, black people have been the victims of a level of brutality to which we cannot relate.

That brutality began with being ripped away from their homes and families. Their cultural identities were erased, and their names taken away from them. They were enslaved to build a new land where their kidnappers could enjoy new lives and freedoms that they themselves would be denied. They were whipped, beaten and degraded. Their children and families were sold away from them. Women were raped. They were murdered. All of these things were done for generations. 

Many of our ancestors probably thought we had adequately addressed the wrong with the abolishment of slavery. On paper, blacks were no longer property.

But slavery is more than a law—more than a piece of paper stating ownership. Slavery is as much societal and cultural as it is literal. The physical chains may be gone, but the real chains never went away. 

We have maintained the enslavement of the black community in so many ways. We have managed to limit their access to the same quality of education our own children receive. We have made it difficult for black Americans to receive loans in order to own homes or start their own businesses. We maintain barriers to success that ensure the road out of poverty will be much rockier for them. We perpetuate the lies that black people are lazy, they’re often involved in criminal activity and gangs. We perpetuate the idea that the reason they can’t succeed is because they don’t really want to, and they just want someone else to blame. There are few avenues that offer success and a modicum of freedom. If you are a phenomenal athlete or entertainer, you might have a chance. If you play ball, sing or dance for our entertainment or so we can profit from you, we may find value in you. We have created a culture of oppression and fear that has mothers teaching their children how they must behave in hopes that when they are pulled over or approached by a police officer, they might make it home alive. We have made sure they understand even the smallest infraction or crime will be heavily punished, and they will likely be incarcerated for that crime for a much longer duration than we would be for a crime two or three times more significant. We have found multiple ways in which to openly lynch black Americans—we’re so good at it, that now we can do it in their homes while they sleep, we can do it while they are jogging in their neighborhoods, and we can do it with our knee upon their neck while dozens helplessly watch. 

As a white middle class woman, these are things I know. But I also know that my “knowledge” barely scratches the surface of the story for black Americans.

As we approach the seventh day since George Floyd was murdered by a police officer, our country is openly burning, and many of us are in shock. We’re in shock when we see this fire because we don’t want this story to be ours. Black Americans don’t have the privilege of denying it. 

For black Americans, their entire existence has been the scene of the fire for generations. For black Americans, every time they try to build hope for a future that belongs to them too, we burn it down. For black Americans, every time they demonstrate the depth of their pain through peaceful means, we burn that peaceful message to remind them we are unwilling to listen. For black Americans, every time they light a candle to see their way to a better future for themselves and their children, we snatch the candle away and set fire to their dreams. 

They owe us nothing, but so many times, and in so many ways they have tried to peacefully tell the story of their pain and fear so we will not only listen, but so we will change. They have been telling us their house is on fire for generations. They have been telling us the story of how they don’t know where they come from, because they were stolen from their countries of origin. They have been telling us the story of how they helped build this country—by force—and they simply want to live as equal citizens alongside the rest of us. They have been telling us the story of how we keep killing them and reminding them that their lives and their stories are as important to us as the ashes swirling in the breeze. 

We haven’t chosen to see them marching down the road with arms linked singing hymns. We haven’t chosen to fulfill the dream. We haven’t chosen to understand the moments when they peacefully asked for their seat on the bus, their desk in the classroom, and their spot at the lunch counter. We haven’t chosen to see them kneeling on a football field and asking for change. We haven’t chosen to hear them when they plead for air because they cannot breathe. 

We see fires. We see broken windows. We see people taking things that don’t belong to them. What we keep failing to see or hear is our part in their story. We choose to see the fires, the broken windows, material objects being stolen, because that makes it easier to push aside the fact that our deliberate oppression and violence is a story we are unwilling to own.

We refuse to accept the story of how we stole a people. We refuse to accept the story of how we worked and sold them like livestock. We refuse to accept the story of how we have murdered them for hundreds of years—because we can. We refuse to accept the story of how we are the ones who set the fires burning down their houses. 

We have refused to hear, understand or accept their story, because if we accept their story, we have to accept our own. 

Doors left ajar and all the big and small things we mourn

So, it really stinks to feel things very deeply—especially the hard things. To be a person who gets a minor emotional scrape, but feels it as if I’m being flayed like a fish can make me feel a little ridiculous—a little weak.

Today’s one of those days. 

Nothing about the last five months has been easy, but the last two have been especially hard, and today feels like a comma in a sentence that will never have a proper punctuation to end it. 

I got in my car to drive down the hill to my daughter’s school this morning. It’s the day we pick up personal belongings and drop off library books. When I got into my car, I didn’t feel so much as a pin prick—it was just a task to complete. 

Maybe it was all of the “we miss you signs,” or the balloons bundled like arches, trying to remind everyone that the end of a school year is supposed to be a happy thing. Instead, it felt like unfinished business—a door left ajar.

I’m always the emotional, weepy mom dropping off the first day, and picking up the last. Maybe that’s just how it was going to be anyway. I felt myself mourning the fact that she didn’t get an end of the year hug from her kindergarten teacher. And whether I thought the day I went to help her class pack up everything they needed for distance learning was probably going to be the last day for them or not—I would never have spoken those words or accepted them. 

When I arrived home with the ridiculous tears streaming down my face, my husband reminded me that our daughter doesn’t know the difference. She doesn’t really have a sense that she missed “the end” of anything in the way many of us are feeling it.

I believe this may be Pete the Cat. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s the end of your kid’s first year, fifth year, or college graduation, for parents who were expecting a proper closing of the door, it feels like we left something important unattended to. And sure, there are plenty of kids feeling that too. 

These are losses for all of us experiencing them. It doesn’t matter whether we think all of the decisions that have been made were appropriate, or if we think closures and restrictions were overkill. Just because I trust science and medicine over politicians and businessmen doesn’t mean I don’t feel the frustrations, anxiety, the anger about different decisions, and the sadness about so many little losses. In fact, because of the way I am built mentally, I don’t feel any of these things in a vacuum—I feel them for every single one of us. 

They’re all hard things—no matter how big or small. 

Living through this period of time is very stressful. Many of us are worried about the health and safety of people we care about. Many of us are anxious about how this crisis has impacted our families’ incomes and stability. We’re worried about our kids’ education. We’re feeling trapped in a circumstance that has left us feeling like life isn’t in our hands—in our control. 

All of this is so heavy. It’s no wonder the small losses are the ones we can allow ourselves to feel and to process. 

I chatted with a friend last night, and she mentioned celebrating her granddaughter’s birthday. Her granddaughter is one of my daughter’s friends, and I don’t think we’ve ever missed her birthday. I felt sad, because without the text invite to a party, I didn’t remember when her birthday was. It’s silly, I suppose, but we lost another little life event. 

It feels a little silly to feel so much about small losses when thousands of families are mourning loved ones who died alone. It feels silly to feel so much about small losses when millions of us are experiencing the very serious stresses of unemployment, furloughs, decreased incomes and worries about how long we can continue on under current conditions. 

So, as always, I feel a tug of guilt about feeling so deeply about the little things. Maybe in some way, they are more tangible, because without them, time that is filled with so much mundanity and simply putting one foot in front of the other passes without punctuation—without doors being closed. 

The truth is most of us are unconnected to the thousands who have lost their lives and the millions who have been directly touched by this unseeable entity. All we can connect with are the its effects. 

Feeling the worry over day to day survival, responsibilities, loss of little things, and all the doors forever left ajar doesn’t diminish the big picture—the loss of so many people who were more than faceless numbers. 

I saw something on Facebook recently expressing the criticism that the media hasn’t done a memorial to the dead from this virus. 

My feeling is that because this death is continuous—the tragic event hasn’t ended. Maybe that’s another reason why so many of us are mourning small losses—because trying to mourn the big thing is impossible. The big thing is the biggest unpunctuated sentence of all. How can you properly mourn a loss that feels like a run-on sentence—a tragedy taking place in slow motion? 

We’ll find the rainbow after the storm, and see the sun again.

And so we feel what we know how to feel. I know how to be sad my daughter didn’t get a sweet last day of school with her teacher and classmates. I know how to be worried that this crisis is touching our family’s security. I know how to worry about loved ones who might not survive getting this virus. I know how to feel frustrated by not having the freedom and space I need to process all of these small things, and the biggest thing. 

New threats, and new rolls: Will we learn to change?

So, it’s March 18, 2020. In America, we’re just under eight months from a presidential election that will probably be the most important of our lifetime. And we are in the midst of possibly the worst crisis any of us will ever witness. For many of us, just saying that seems crazy—after all, we easily remember the days and weeks following the 9/11 attacks. I was pretty sure that was going to be the most pivotal moment in my life. 

What changed between then and now? Not many of us would have imagined that our lives may be in greater danger from an enemy we can’t see—a virus that jumped from animals to humans, then mutated to spread like wildfire, and became so virulent that millions will contract it, and possibly millions will die from it.

For the last few years, Americans have been at war with each other over so many things. The interesting thing is that with a few exceptions, we’re fighting for and about many of the same worries. How do we make sure people don’t die due to lack of healthcare or go bankrupt trying to pay for it? How do we prevent the destruction of the middle class as the wealthier become obscenely more wealthy, and the poor are written off as lazy and worthless? What do we do about a generation of young people who were told their future depended on a higher education, but after graduating, they cannot depend on the career or wages they were promised, so they’re drowning in education debt and unable to be sure of their futures? How do we reconcile our differences of faith—especially when individual rights and liberties are becoming increasingly more threatened within a framework that was never intended to be based on one specific faith? How is it that so many of us believed we were moving in a more inclusive and less discriminatory direction, but we now find ourselves living in a time when racism, bigotry, homophobia, and xenophobia have reached a fever pitch? 

There are a lot of questions. Everyone has a different answer. Few people are willing to meet anywhere in the middle. And most of us believe terrible things about the people with whom we disagree. Even when facing an unseen enemy that may kill a fair number of us, we see it through different eyes. 

Even if we can’t agree on answers, one thing is true—a killer virus doesn’t give a damn about our agreements or disagreements. It will come for us no matter who we vote for, no matter what party we belong to, and whether we believe in tough love capitalism or help your fellow man “socialism.” 

COVID-19 is one organism that doesn’t discriminate. 

We are all under the same threat. We all face a health care crisis that will max out our system’s capacity. We all face the repercussions of a possible economic disaster. As businesses are forced to shut down with the hopes of saving lives, many are losing their livelihoods. Those among us who were already barely scraping by will be the hardest hit. We all wonder if people we care about will be victims of this indiscriminate killer. 

The reality is that many Americans have been in pain for a long time. The crunch of an ever increasing cost of living, and wages that have been outpaced for decades mean that many of us aren’t certain about the future. Sadly, the pain we feel also makes us retreat to our respective ideological corners, where we seethe and point fingers of blame. 

It’s the undocumented immigrants sneaking into the country from our southern border. It’s the wealth hoarding fat cats of business. It’s the young mom who is struggling to care for a child on her own, and getting food stamps. There are plenty of directions for our fingers to point. 

That’s one thing we do have in common with COVID-19–it’s infecting and killing people in every direction. 

A couple of months ago, a lot of us were in denial about this common enemy. We believed it to be overblown—just another random virus from Asia that was supposed to be deadly, but would eventually peter out like the annual influenza strains. Some of us believe our president either lied about the seriousness of the disease, or that he just wasn’t willing to listen to, and act upon the threat before it was on the cusp of being uncontainable. Others still believe that this is the equivalent of Chicken Little running around, telling everyone the sky is falling when all they can see are fluffy white clouds. 

COVID-19 will infect and kill people from both camps. It really doesn’t care. 

As we all begin to realize either the potential of millions dying, or a complete economic collapse, we all are starting to agree that we can’t survive this situation without our government’s help. Small businesses are being crushed by social distancing and no customers. Big business is feeling the pressure to do something many of us have been clamoring for forever—step up and behave like good citizens instead of just throwing money at politicians to maintain their profits at the expense of the workers who support them. 

Funny how a couple of people in the current presidential race were just saying that the pain we have been feeling for so long was a giant, gaping wound that had been left to fester for too long. They were just telling us that our government needed to serve the people who elected them, and needed to make big business and the very wealthy step up and at least contribute their fair share. 

We all know that job creators are one of the arteries supplying life blood to the economy. Business—both big and small are a substantial contributor to the flow. But in recent days, as we walk the aisles of our local supermarkets, it’s not big or small business making sure the shelves have been sanitized and that the limited supply of critical items has been restocked. That would be the store employee who doesn’t even earn a living wage. They are working their shifts, and taking the risk of being exposed to an unseen killer, carried by an unknowing shopper. 

Will this be the moment when we finally understand that every job done is as valuable as the person doing it, instead of the number of years in school, degrees, or type of work—that anyone working full time should make enough to do more than scrape by or survive? 

We have argued about the human impact on climate. Some of us believe the destruction of our environment is outpacing our ability to turn the tide. Others believe that climate has been changing throughout time, and there’s little that humans do that impacts it either way. And yet, in the face of COVID-19, social distancing and lockdowns have revealed cleaner air quality in China and fish swimming in Venice where the waters were previously too dirty for them. 

Is COVID-19 and our efforts to combat it going to be the event that persuades people to understand that scientific facts are true, even if we don’t want to believe them? 

Our children are at home, their schools being shut down for weeks to months. Teachers are providing education via computers, and parents are getting the opportunity to see just how much we rely on our schools—especially those teachers. We’re getting a crash course in how much stability our schools provide for children in the form of meals they otherwise may not be getting at home, and coincidental childcare that allows us to go out into the world and work for our livings. We’re also getting to see just how much our teachers and our children are expected to complete in a seven-hour day. Our teachers—many of whom have their own children that they must help with their schoolwork—are putting our children first, as they make videos in their basements, garages and kitchens to provide instruction and structure. 

Will COVID-19 finally teach us what is important and valuable about our schools and teachers? And will we finally focus on meaningful learning, pay our teachers what they’re worth, and never expect them to pay for supplies out of their own budgets again? 

As our children have been sent home, parents working in jobs that can’t be done in home offices are faced with difficult child care scenarios. School was there plan A, and Grandma and Grandpa we’re plan B. Now even paid daycare—some people’s only plan is either unavailable, or operating at great personal risk to keep these workers afloat. 

Will we finally understand how vital affordable child care is for everyone, and that the people providing it deserve our respect and a living wage? 

We live in a culture that has become increasingly more 24/7–everything and everyone must be available and running at all times. We have 24-hour department and grocery stores, fast food and gyms. When we feel an ache, pain or cough hit us, we push right through—both because we are expected to, and because we have no paid sick leave or rainy day savings. But the demands of COVID-19 have forced stores and other businesses to adjust their normal hours. Walmart now closes shortly after my six-year-old’s bedtime. Who would have thought? And in the face of a killer, health care experts are pleading with us to stay home when we’re sick. 

Will this be the moment when we understand life is more important than dollars, and that there are some safety nets that are not only intended to protect the individual receiving help, but the rest of as well? 

There are so many questions. And I remember right after the 9/11 attacks, we talked a big game about pulling together, and taking on the threat of the moment. Many of us believed the event would change us forever—or at least for a long time? Is this how it is with every disaster—you pull together in the immediate aftermath, but scatter when the threat is no longer in your face every moment of the 24-hour news cycle? Do we really never change? 

I’ve been seeing all the social media posts about shopping for people who are at higher risk if they become infected. Whole groups are virtually pooling information and resources to support people who aren’t getting paid to be off, and small businesses that will go under without customers. I’ve read the stories of people handing over a roll or two of toilet paper to people they run into who got to the store too late to get a pack before it was sucked into the panic vortex. 

It’s all very heartwarming. It gives you the feeling that if we can do this because a “gun” is at the back of our heads, we could surely do it when there isn’t one. I don’t in any way mean to discount any of these positive things. I’m just wondering what it would take for these changes of the moment to become changes that last a lifetime? 

Clear your own path

There are periods of time that are just hard. You feel yourself being pushed and pulled, or you feel like your spinning your wheels. You learn to pull loose ends together quickly, because you so easily find yourself off track.

You know you could be doing everything better—if you only chose to put the most important things first. But you’re getting along, so you waste an hour here or there on things that probably don’t matter.

And then, something unexpected comes up, and you find yourself with very little control, and very few choices. So many things catch up with you, which doesn’t make sense, because you were the one who was actually behind.

All of these kinds of things occur to you when you get hurt or really sick. You understand that with a few exceptions, you spend most of your time living for expediency, and less of it for solid meaning. 

Last year, I quietly told myself that I wasn’t going to let so many things come first before the important things. I wasn’t going to let everything else come before writing. I started picking at it again, like a fork tine lifting crust on a slice of pie. It wasn’t enough to amount to anything, but it did remind me that at one point, I had a path. 

I got lucky, because someone else invited me to join her writing path, and it kept me from failing myself as I think I would have otherwise. 

I didn’t make a secret pact with myself this year—no magnanimous resolutions or announcements to the world that I would get any of my acts together. Mostly, it’s easier not to break the promises we don’t make. 

It’s probably better that I didn’t even quietly converse with myself about time ticking away, and the outrageous privilege of frittering it away—even though my current day job is tough, and I do believe that some wasted time isn’t actually wasted at all. 

It ends up that at the beginning of this year, things have spun out of control early. My dearest lifelong friend is at the beginning of a fight for her life. Just thinking the words in that sentence makes me want to shut down for a while, because words have power, and who isn’t stopped in their tracks by a punch in the gut like that? 

Living in this world, there are a thousand things to occupy your thoughts and your time. They live on a spectrum of importance, and moments both magnify and dull them. It feels like a million years has passed in the few weeks since everything in my friend’s life changed forever. I am at a standstill while the branches of her universe are swept past me in a raging current, and I am powerless. But my own powerlessness is of no significance. If I had anything, it would be hers in a heartbeat. 

We can’t control each other’s storms or paths. And sometimes, we even fail to control our own. That takes me back to the idea of failing to put the right things first. Sometimes, the choices seem obvious, and sometimes we think the impact of our choices is clear. 

That’s not always the case. 

Getting off the path can become a big problem—especially when it’s a habit. Sometimes, we get distracted. There’s something that seems worth looking at more closely. Sometimes, we think we’re doing the right thing. Most of the time, the path is a metaphor, and there is no urgency about the situation—just marks along the way to remind us of where we are in relation to where we thought we were going. But sometimes, the metaphor becomes real. 

I have a bad habit of stepping aside for other people, because deep down, I don’t think the space I occupy is as important as that of others. Forever, my husband has told me to stand my ground when we are out places together, and someone walks toward me, as if I’m not even there—as if I am invisible. I pretty much always step aside to let the other person pass, because I don’t believe they will go around me. How can someone go around a person they don’t see?

A week ago, stepping aside for someone who was heading the wrong direction cost me. I fell down hard, and broke my arm in multiple places. I knew it was broken as soon as I hit the ground. The woman walking the wrong way came back to where I lay fallen on the ground and clutching my mangled arm against my chest. She said nothing. I knew she was there, and I could have been angry, but even though she hadn’t been in the right, I also had been in the wrong. I had put myself in harm’s way by putting her place on the path ahead of my own. 

I have reasoned with myself that I had to let her pass—she was an elderly woman. It would have been wrong for me to play sidewalk chicken with an old lady in the forest, in the dark. But the truth is, I would have stepped aside for anyone. 

A million times I have done the same thing. Now, I am recovering from surgery. I have a plate and screws holding the broken bits together, and I am in more physical pain than I have ever been. Everything in our life is completely out of sync and out of my control. I feel like a fool. 

Now, you may be thinking that I shouldn’t be taking this situation so seriously, and that beating myself up about it isn’t going to help. Maybe those are valid points. Maybe I’m just stuck in the moment and it reminds me of how wasteful I can be with time, freedom, autonomy, and passion. Now, here I sit, barely able to take care of myself, let alone manage anything else. Maybe I feel like I should be stronger, and that instead of letting a quiet feeling of “less than” knock me down, I should realize that letting myself be knocked down doesn’t just affect me. 

Right now, it’s a few bones that have been forced back into alignment in a very painful way that has my family and me off track, and me unable to be with my friend when she needs me. But when I look deeper, I am always allowing things to get me off track and to hijack things that are important. 

It’s not easy to put yourself first. It’s not easy to stay on your own path when life comes at you. And like it or not, sometimes you are only reminded of your own value when you put the wrong things ahead of yourself and you find yourself flat on your back with no other choice. 

Sometimes, looking at yourself and realizing how prone to self-sabotage you are is just as important as helping someone else. Maybe it’s not someone else’s path you should be clearing. Maybe it’s time to get out of your own way. 

The walls that make America

So, over the last several years many of us with privilege have learned some painful lessons about our country. One of the lessons we have learned is that a portion of our population still responds to racist dog whistles, and ahead of all of their own interests, they would rather support someone holding that whistle than have lower drug prices, wealth equity, an environment not under threat by continuing to favor fossil fuels and by rolling back basic protections, affordable higher education for everyone, healthcare, and infrastructure. 

That’s a short list of the things that aren’t as important as answering that whistle like a lap dog. The promise of a big and beautiful wall to keep us safe from poor and desperate brown people who are coming to steal our jobs, get free stuff, commit crimes and drive down wages is like a beacon—calling to that shining city on the hill—the city that keeps out anyone who doesn’t look or speak like us.

Some walls protect us, while others destroy us.

There are so many things that we have learned. 

Of course, these are lessons plenty of black Americans have known almost since birth. They have lived their entire lives behind the walls those of us with privilege have either built or allowed to remind them, every day, that they are second class citizens at best, or subhuman at worst. These same walls stand high as mothers teach their sons they will be held to a much higher standard by police officers than their white counterparts if they must interact with police officer, because they may not come home again. These same walls stand as obstacles to the access to quality education and healthcare whites enjoy. 

Some of us with privilege have started to wipe away the hazy sleep from our eyes—not because we have earned the label of being woke,” but because we suddenly feel threatened by walls ourselves. 

Women have lived all of their lives behind a wall of inequality. We have lived being paid less for the same work as our male counterparts. We have been blamed for violence perpetrated against us, because somehow there are a million ways in which we ask to be violated and harmed—even if we are simply walking down a sidewalk. We have lived with the additional threat that we have no autonomy over our own bodies and what happens to them. Our worth and our position in society dictates that we are not entitled to the same rights and freedom from discrimination and harm as men—even while we are not asking for more than they are able to take for granted. We thought we had made progress, but we learned that walls can go up very quickly. 

Same sex couples have lived their lives behind the walls of discrimination and exclusion and struggling to acquire the basic rights other couples take for granted. They have fought to have the right to marry the people they love, to be able to adopt children, share property, and access spousal employment benefits. And that’s just a short list. In recent years, same sex couples had attained some of the rights they had been fighting for, but they have seen that there will always be someone standing ready to rebuild walls.

Americans of the LGBTQ community have lived their lives behind the wall of fear of being harmed, being unable to access necessary healthcare, being fired from their jobs, being unable to access and retain housing, and having equal access to education without discrimination. Transgender women of color are particularly at a higher risk of being the targets of violent crime or death. The tide of legal discrimination was very slowly beginning to turn. An end of the discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in our military had finally come. Very quickly an open ban on transgender Americans serving in our armed forces reminded us that the walls that were being dismantled could go right back up. 

Americans outside of the Christian faith have unexpectedly found themselves living behind the walls of fear that they will be discriminated against, targeted with violence while in their places of worship or wearing traditional garments associated with their faiths, and being believed to be anti-American or potentially threatening to others. The promise of freedom of religion was a wall that Americans of different faiths believed they could count on, but along with the threat of violence, many saw the wall solidified when loved ones hoping to emigrate or seek refuge were banned from America’s promise of freedom. 

These are some of the walls we decide to maintain when we support the ideals of fear of “the other,” superiority over people of color, women, anyone who is not “heteronormative,” or Christian. These are the walls that guard us from the original promise and potential of America. 

As we think about American walls, there is one wall that we seemingly have decided not to care about or fight for. It’s a wall that was designed to protect everyone in our nation from tyranny, oppression and abuse by our leadership when it deigns to put its own power over its obligation to and its oath of service. It’s a wall that was designed to help our leaders protect us from foreign invasion, foreign political interference, and to keep our democracy safe and intact.

This week, people we voted for have the power to make sure this wall continues to stand—that it continues to mean something. This week, people we voted for have the power to decide whether the efforts of our founders to create structures, limits and boundaries in place to balance powers are still relevant, or if they are so worthless that they should be ignored and kicked to the curb with all the other extraneous garbage we no longer care about. 

When our leadership wraps itself in the luxe and engulfing embrace of power, and allows that power to do what we know power can do—corrupt its intentions and tempt it to actions in direct contradiction to the structures, limits and boundaries, the people we voted for have a duty. 

Why is action so urgent that the people we voted for not pursue enforcing subpoenas through the courts? Why is patience a travesty in this situation? Quite simply, it’s because failure to act ensures that our next election will be tainted by the scandal of foreign interference—again. And this time, it will be at the direct and explicit invitation of our president. Allowing that to stand allows everything else to fall.

This week the  wall—our Constitution—is swaying in the breeze of a potentially powerful wind. 

What will they do? Will they answer to the better angels of our nature—the framers of that wall—or listen to the intoxicating whispers of the demon that threatens to destroy the foundation—the whispers of their own power? 

We should all be afraid of the looming and likely answer.