Taking a Stand, Getting Together, and Then . . . ?

 

Standing against vs standing with

It’s 1955. I’m 19 years old, just enlisted in the US Navy and going through the initial boot camp training. On a Sunday morning I’m in the barracks laundry room and hear a commotion outside, where the clotheslines are. So I step outside to see what's going on. A Black sailor is hanging up his laundry. A bunch of white guys are leaning out of their second-story windows, yelling the usual racist insults at the Black guy. I don’t like that and decide to try to do something about it. So I walk out there, stand next to the Black guy and look up at the white guys. I had played quarterback in high school and had learned “command voice.” So I decide to use it. I yell at the white guys, “Shut the fuck up!”

Then, looking up at those outraged white faces, I begin to think that might not have been a very smart thing to do.  But, to my surprise, they begin quieting down and pulling back out of the windows. So I turn to the Black guy – and he's gone! I hear the door slam behind him as he leaves the scene. 

At the time, I thought I had done the right thing. I had taken a stand against racism. And I wondered what was going on with the Black guy. Did he not appreciate what I had done to defend him? 

Later, I rethought the matter and decided that maybe to the Black guy what I had done was just another example of white supremacy, my assuming that it was up to the white guy to take charge of the situation. 

Years later, in 1986, I joined (was allowed to join) the predominantly-Black Alabama New South Coalition, and even had the honor of serving a term on its board of directors, when at meetings I would be the only white person in the room. And, from time to time I would find an opportunity to ask one of those new friends what they thought of my story and my “white supremacy” interpretation.  Their response was always a very realistic “Yes, but what you don’t seem to realize is that guy might well have saved your life. He saw what you did was just going to escalate the confrontation, and the thing to do was just get the hell out of there.” 

So now, at long last I realize what I should have done was not “take a stand against . . . ” but ignore the white guys and take a stand with the Black guy, strike up a conversation, introduce myself, shake his hand, etc. When we talk about "taking a stand against" something, or "taking a stand for" something, those somethings are abstractions. Racism. Inequality. Democracy. Justice. Sure, those are important issues. But let's realize how easy it is to go wrong as we try to translate those abstractions into specific and practical actions.

We don't "take a stand with" a something, but with a someone. That difference matters.

Getting together

Now it’s 1978 and my wife Cynthia has just been diagnosed with serious breast cancer. We hear that a new cancer support group is being organized out of East Alabama Medical Center, and Cyn decides she wants to join. The group calls itself “TOUCH.” An acronym for “Today Our Understanding of Cancer is Hope.” Advisors helping the group get organized had mentioned research showing cancer was such a scary thing that cancer patients in hospitals did not get physically touched by nurses, doctors or other staff nearly as often as other patients. So the group said, “We will not be untouchables.” 

Further, one of the professional advisors was a licensed massage therapist who also happened to be dean of the school of nursing at Auburn University. She explained how important physical – and loving – touch was for healthy human physical and emotional development and relationships. Starting of course with infants but remaining important into old age. And she demonstrated loving massage techniques for the group. So the Touch group – 20 to 30 people of all kinds, most having never met before – became a very touchy-feely all-of-us-together thing, with lots of formalized and impromptu hugging and hand-holding. 

That was a totally new and sometimes difficult learning experience for me, the living-in-my-head wanna-be intellectual that I was back then. The all-of-us-together aspect was deepened for me by seeing how the group adapted to having members with different needs and purposes. Some were there needing help to cope with active cancers. That was Cyn's need. But some were in remission, there to tell their stories and help others by visiting newly-diagnosed cancer patients (with permission from doctors and families) to show “today our understanding of cancer is hope.” The motto the Touch group adopted was “No one so healthy or strong that they don’t ever need help; and no one so weak or needy that they can’t ever give help to others.”

Cynthia didn't survive her cancer. But I'm sure to a great extent her TOUCH experience, along with other related counseling programs, helped her live twice the median life expectancy of patients with her diagnosis. She was active and had good quality of life up until just a month or two before she died in September of 1984. 

Where are we going?

Now it’s fall 2022 and we have gone through two and a half years of pandemic (no, Joe, it isn't over yet) that has largely prevented us from fully practicing these touchy-feeling ways of being and doing that make us better in-this-together humans. I love our computers and the way Zoom has enabled us at least to see and talk with each other. But its virtual "touch" it's not as good as in-person contact. For one thing,  it doesn't seem to allow full eye contact (at least in the group Zooms I have participated in). We rely, consciously or unconsciously, on seeing other people's eye movements when we are speaking with them to judge their responses. Are they "rolling their eyes?" for example. We humans are the only mammals that have the sclera, the "whites of their eyes," that enable that kind of communication.

I am especially worried about “virtual solutions” to the pandemic problem that could or are even intended to stay in effect long after a pandemic threat might be ended. Keeping us separated, isolated, our primary connection being to a computer system. Naomi Klein has explained this well: 

Something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.Silicon Valley had this pre-existing agenda before Covid that imagined replacing so many of our personal bodily experiences by inserting technology in the middle of them. So for the few spaces where tech is not already mediating our relationships, there was a plan – to replace in-person teaching with virtual learning, for instance, and in-person medicine with telehealth and in-person delivery with robots. All of this has been rebranded, post-Covid, as a touchless technology, as a way of replacing what has been diagnosed as the problem, which is the problem of touch. On a personal level, what we miss most is touch. . . . How are we going to live with this thing? Are we going to accept pre-Covid “normal,” only much diminished, without the relationships that sustain us?
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/13/naomi-klein-we-must-not-return-to-the-pre-covid-status-quo-only-worse

For example – Here’s the abstract description of a Microsoft patent that shows how far (so far) the technology wizards imagine taking the computerization of our bodies and lives.

Abstract – CRYPTOCURRENCY SYSTEM USING BODY ACTIVITY DATA
Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system. A server may provide a task to a device of a user which is communicatively coupled to the server. A sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user may sense body activity of the user. Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system, and award cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified.
https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2020060606

The “body activity” that could be monitored is said to include “radiation emitted from the human body, brain activities, body fluid flow, blood flow, organ activity, body movement such as eye movement, facial movement, and muscle movement, as well as any other activities that can be sensed and represented by images, waves, signals, texts, numbers, degrees, or any other information or data.” https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-09-23/bill-gates-global-agenda-and-how-we-can-resist-his-war-on-life/

To be continued?

Here I want to refer you to my 2019 post: The human "precision grip" and the Fourth of July, with the paired photos, the adorable baby (my great-great granddaughter Hope) using her precision grip to pull the blanket aside and look me in the eye, inviting a smile or a hug,  alongside the 1970 CBS TV Earth Day special opening screen, a human hand gripping our "blue planet" as though to choke the life out of it. The caption being A Question of Survival. 

So the story is about how in our early evolution we acquired physical traits (such as the precision grip) and the brain-smarts to develop technologies giving us a huge evolutionary advantage. Starting with being able to kill at a distance (which we've gotten way too good at). But the brain-smarts also included recognition that togetherness was crucial to our survival. A lone individual, no matter how rugged, didn't stand much of a chance against that saber-tooth tiger. 

Indeed, we are super-social animals. And our cooperative working-togetherness has certainly helped us develop the technological marvels we now enjoy (?). However. On the social/political togetherness side we are too much stuck with our early- learned tribal instincts, creating political/social/religious/cultural factions fighting each other. Every issue becomes an Us vs Them fight, with both sides more interested in "winning" the argument than in working together to find practical solutions to actual problems. 

In this Situation, climate change and ecological devastation (ecocide) keep on keeping on, and all the while the tech wizards keep on with their plans of a total computerized takeover of our lives. Which I'm afraid is beginning to seem inevitable. 

What can we do? For now, I just want to suggest looking at two organizations I think model healthier ways of being and  doing.

Agraria (agrariacenter.org), located in Yellow Springs, Ohio, "is a Center for Regenerative Practice, reflecting our belief that regeneration applies to not only healthy agricultural practices but is a mindset to underlie all we do, from the environmental, economic, psychological, and social realms to human health and well-being. We work to help build vibrant, just, and resilient communities, starting where we are."

Braver Angels (braverangels.org) "is a national movement to bridge the partisan divide, bringing conservatives and progressives together on equal terms to understand our differences, find common ground where it exists, and help the country we all love find a better way."

Your thoughts, please? This section of this post is titled To be continued? So now it's your turn, let us hear, please and thank you.   

When will the future happen?

NOW 

Stephen Hawking informs us 

nothing existed before the Big Bang. 

I have not heard whether he believed 

“nothing” existed after the Bang. 

In my own life as a space-time traveler 

exploring this one blue world, 

I once upon a time found myself

at a happily noisy cocktail party 

in a neighborhood of North America 

the natives called “Coconut Grove, Florida.” 

It was a lovely summer evening, they said 

it happened to be the 15th day of June 

in their year 1965. But I knew better, 

I heard the Voices clearly calmly saying 

 Everything that has ever happened, 

 or ever could happen, 

 is happening right here, right now. 

Fellow travelers, here is your take-home message 

take it to heart and share with all – 

 Be cheerful, fear not, and be assured 

 there is no such thing as nothing. 

We breathe the world in 

the world breathes us out 

and nothing is lost. 

Take a deep breath, smiling, 

now. 

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

You may be wondering, what is this weird “poem” doing in the Slowdown blog? Well, I’ve recently been participating with others in zoomed discussion of a book, What We Owe the Future, by William MacAskill. I don’t like the book (see https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo) but it does raise interesting and important questions about the future of humans, and our possible extinction, coming either very soon or in some eventual future. But MacAskill also invites us to consider what he calls “the best possible future” – Civilisation is full of beings with long, blissful, and flourishing lives, full of artistic and scientific accomplishment, expanded across the cosmos. An absurd vision, total fantasy. So I decided to post my own take on the future – as expressed recently in this something like a poem. Also absurd, but in another sense and I think closer to our here-and-now reality.

I saw Stephen Hawking’s “nothing before the bang” statement in an internet headline not long before he died, and pondering that led to this poem, my most direct presentation of a very fuzzy intuition of the essential connectedness of everything I recall entertaining as early as my first two years of college when my roommate was a physics grad student and I took a comparative religions course. The particular formulation of that intuition, Everything that has ever happened occurred to me at that Coconut Grove cocktail party, and the Hawking thing/no thing gave me a way to work it into something like a poem. 

Can a poem proclaiming such absurdities as “there is no such thing as nothing” be taken seriously? Well, so many of the findings of modern sciences, especially physics, seem to lead us into the realm of absurdity – which seems to be the realm of ultimate reality. Consider the case of quantum entanglement. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” Maybe there is no such thing as “distance?” In a recent Krista Tippet On Being interview, Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek says “Relativity teaches us to think of spacetime as a whole and that it’s very unnatural to divide them. So it leads, I think, very much to the world-view that the world — that is, spacetime — simply is. It does not happen. It already encompasses all times.” 

I’m happy to report also finding affirmation of “essential connectedness” by my favorite theologian, Walter Wink. In a chapter of his autobiography (My Struggle to Become Human) titled “The New Physics,” he characterizes the Big Bang as the “Big Breath:” 

“We are all one matter. Our bodies are virtually all water, and every drop of water in our bodies has been in every spring, every river, every lake, and every ocean during the last 4.5 billion years on earth. Each breath we breathe contains a quadrillion atoms, and more than a million of these atoms have been breathed personally sometime by each and every person on earth. We are all one breath. We are all one body, for good or ill. Likewise, attraction is characteristic of everything, from gravity to love. We are all one embrace. If ever a creature should feel at home in our universe, it is human beings.” 

(And I’m especially happy to report that I wrote the “breathe in, breathe out” part of the poem well before I had come across Wink’s beautiful statement.) 

So I say be cheerful and fear not: Although our lives may seem insignificantly transient, those quantum-entangled particles making up our bodies are stardust, making our every here-and-now moment part of a vast cosmic drama. That happily noisy cocktail party I am so grateful for having been invited to. 

Now I have to add that the line “Nothing is lost” included itself in the first draft of this poem. But then was taken out, then put back in in further drafts. What is ultimate reality does not spare us our lived experience of losses – in my case most recently the death of a teenage granddaughter, killed in a freak, totally unlikely accident. Yet Claire’s amazing loveliness, expressed in so many beautiful ways in her lifetime, also still remains. Is still happening right here, right now. 

PS – I chose to make “Everything that has ever happened” the title of my Jim Allen: Selected Poems, 1972-2022 chapbook. Homemade one-off editions available (for free) only by snailmail, by request.