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.
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.
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?
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