Time to tell the truth

Brent Staples wrote a remarkable piece in the New York Times last Sunday, June 19, 2020, about Tulsa. He shared a story I'd not heard before --

The helpless old black man who was shredded alive behind a fast-moving car would have been well known in Tulsa’s white downtown, where he supported himself by selling pencils and singing for coins. He was blind, had suffered amputations of both legs and wore baseball catcher’s mitts to protect his hands from the pavement as he scooted along on a wheeled wooden platform.  Among the white bystanders who witnessed the pencil seller’s grisly end was a teenager named E.W. Maxey, who was undersheriff of Tulsa County by the time he recounted the carnage to the local historian Ruth Sigler Avery 50 years later. Undersheriff Maxey admitted to knowing the thugs who tied the “good old colored man” to a convertible and sped off along Main Street. Describing the scene to Ms. Avery in 1971, he recalled that the victim “was hollering. His head was being bashed in, bouncing on the steel rails and bricks” that lined the street.

Staples makes clear that Maxey, knew who was in that convertible, kept the secret, as white Tulsa tried to keep the secret of the whole massacre.  White people who tell the secret are called names like "race traitor." But that's part of what this moment is about. 

I think the deeper secret is that racism was invented for the sake of the ruling class, which keeps social control and makes extra profit. All of us are asked to keep that secret. The truth is that in the United States it's always about race and class.  

Whatever secrets of whatever atrocities -- is this a privilege that we've been given? Or a living hell?  The US, with 5% of the world's population, has 25% of its prisoners and 25% of its Covid-19 cases.  

This is a moment for each of us to think about deep truths and to consider telling the truth.

"The worst mistake we could make in this time of rallies and marches would be to demand too little!"

June 20, 2020, 1:28pm.  I've just finished participating in the Mass Assembly of the Poor People's Campaign.  I was lucky that I had a great "bus ride" with friends and family.  We laughed and joked, and explained the snacks and books we'd brought for the ride.  We needed this virtual bus to replace the long-awaited bus we were planning to take to Washington.  At 10am, we "arrived" and went to the Assembly, keeping in touch by text, which is the way to "share" an event these days.

The goal of the Assembly was to change the narrative by changing the narrators, and thereby to help us actually see the depth and breadth of the pain of the 140 million poor and low-wealth people in our country. So many people spoke, about so many issues, in short chapters. Women are suffering, let's hear from women. Mass incarceration is choking us, let's hear from the formerly incarcerated. Native communities are suffering, let's hear from them.

Let's hear from them.

I know all of these stories, and am constantly, in my own teaching and writing, trying to get across this point. But nothing I could say could equal the power of this time hearing from people speaking about their struggles. As an American, I am horrified. As a physician, I am crying -- 700 people a day die from poverty, that was before Covid-19, and you could see the weathering in the speakers' bodies and their faces and their voices.

Reverend William Barber II cautioned us that the worst mistake we could make in this time of rallies and marches would be to demand too little. The Assembly was designed to hammer home the lesson that, "The political and economic systems in the U.S. are plagued by the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, militarism and a war economy, ecological devastation and a distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism."

No single demand could undo this -- it is truly an ecology of inequality. Therefore the Poor People's Campaign has pushed for a complex of demands carried by a moral fusion coalition. It is the combination of the two -- complex demands and the moral fusion coalition -- that are the right way forward in these times.

Reverend Barber asked us to each take an inventory of our time on this earth. Not to be morbid, he said, but we've seen how fast and unexpectedly life could end. "If," he asked, "you knew you had 48 hours to live, what would you fight for with your last breath?"

For me, the answer is simple. My life has been about wrapping my mind around the epidemics affecting poor and minority communities, trying to understand the way out of this mess. With my last breath, I'd say, "Join the Poor People's Campaign." If you didn't get to see the Assembly this morning, watch at 6pm tonight or when they post the recording. It lights the way. As they said over and over, "Somebody's hurting our people.  It's gone on far too long, and we won't be silent anymore."

Coronavirus: Every attack on the poor must embolden our agitation!

Back at the beginning of shelter-in-place, I said there were five tasks we had to do to stay same and come out alive.  One was that we must fight for justice.  The outpouring of people into the streets demanding justice makes sense in a time when our fractured, abusive system is laid bare by the deadly progression of coronavirus through the land.

For four years, the 400 Years of Inequality Project has held up the work of Reverend Dr. William Barber II as charting the path away from inequality towards a nation truly for all.  When the Poor People's Campaign announced the Assembly in Washington on June 20th, we pointed our work in that direction.

The time has come.  There are two events we're doing to lead up to the Assembly at 10am this Saturday.

Tonight, we're holding a workshop on the People's Platform for Equity that we wrote based on our 4 years of examining the problem of inequality, including all the observances we got to attend of the 400th Anniversary of Jamestown.  You can join us at tonight (June 17th) at 7pm for an explanation of the People's Platform and how we got there.

Saturday, we've organized a "virtual" bus that will get you to the Assembly on time!  Join us at 9:30am to share signs and chants, as we "go" to Washington to hear the voices of the poor and dispossessed.  Here's a short video from the Poor People's Campaign that will give you a taste of what's to come!

And of course there's the June 20th Assembly of Poor People's Campaign.  Part protest and part programmatic organizing, this Assembly will us get on the same page about the demands we need to place on our governments, local, state and federal, to stop the abuse of the poor, which translates to the abuse of us all.  It will be a crucial moment in this charged era.

Join us!

Be there!

Coronavirus: Hedonism makes us heedless

New Jersey is on pace for more re-opening today.  It is, as Aubrey Murdock put it, a slippery slope -- I want to dive into so many things that I've been missing, hedonism making me heedless.  I fear I am failing the marshmallow test, that test they give kids in kindergarten to see if they can delay gratification.  Of course in the test I'm taking, they keep moving when I get the marshmallow -- it is now not two weeks of delay but maybe a year or two.  And while waiting, I'll be stricken with polio or some other dread disease that is surging in the absence of the usual controls. Or, in my sorry case, diabetes from baking too many cakes. 

I want, in no particular order, to: have fried clams at a beachside shack, see the new MoMA, give a reading of my Main Street book in a crowded bookstore, walk down the street eating ice cream, fly business class to Istanbul and stay at Hotel Turkoman, go to Michel Cantal-Dupart's birthday extravaganza, shop at a Christmas bazaar in Berlin, go to the baths, see a movie at the cinema, and see the Alice at Madame Claude's Bis. You notice immediately that this list does not include "defund the police" or "end war." It's just pleasure. It does not include a single chore or even anything difficult -- no learning, no cleaning, no caretaking. Just fun. And I certainly don't want to wear a mask while doing of any of those things.

Is this what I've really learned from this quiet time of baking bread, exercising, and playing the cello? Is this why the Jazz Age followed World War I and 1918 Flu Pandemic? 

Coronavirus: How We Help: We Listen

One of the students in my Urban Colloquium class this past semester was sheltering-in-place at his home in Queens.  He wrote this poem, which he gave me permission to share here anonymously.

Poem

As I sit safely in my home, my phone is filled with news and Go Fund Mes

The privilege of working remotely, still getting a check, and not feeling hungry

Who is really an essential worker and who is not?

How the hell is my neighborhood dying, yet still being harassed by the cops?

You “discipline” the dying, while handing masks to the living.

I saw the picture, you prefer shirtless white people sitting.

How is it that I keep track of this, yet feel paralyzed by the whole situation?

Trying to keep my family physically and mentally safe has kept me in isolation 

Guilt lays over me and suffocates my character

Who am I? Why am I not helping? Don't all those falling matter?

Am I selfish?

Does being an activist leave room for this? 

You said donating was not enough, and solidarity was the road to bliss.

I have fallen and let myself go

Not knowing how to reach out, I dive back into the computer, though my productivity is low.

Incomplete, I slump into the abyss.

Missing...

A part of me

I miss.

I fall

And continue to fall endlessly, until I am finally interrupted

Without any request, my body begins to resuscitate 

Vibrations begin to fill my soul

Kids yelling, speakers blasting

It was Bad Bunny and Hector Lavoe

I slowly resuscitate 

My neighborhood is living, it has never let me go

This poem captures that moment of despair that so many of us have felt -- what can we do that would be enough in the face of all that is happening?  But then the poet is distracted by the vibrations that begin to fill his body -- "It was Bad Bunny and Hector Lavoe."  As he listens, the burden lifts, is lifted by his neighborhood.

There is so much to listen to these days. Last night I listened to "Why We Fight: Voices from the Struggle for Health Care Justice."  Organized by Voices of a People's History and 400 Years of Inequality, the readings conveyed so many emotions, so many ideas. I resuscitated. The burden was lifted by the neighborhood of people who have struggled over centuries to win justice.

It might be Bad Bunny, it might be Dorothea Dix you need to listen to. What it is I don't know. I know that listening is part of how we heal, find the strength to keep going, resuscitate.

Coronavirus: Of battered spouses and rioters

Herbert Aptheker, the Marxist historian and author of American Negro Slave Revolts, was my professor in college and I often wrote to him in years after graduation to discuss things that were on my mind. One of these was how to name civil unrest. He always used words like "rebellion" to describe the events of the long, hot summers of the 1960s. As my studies of psychiatry progressed, I resisted such language. I thought that "riot" was a better description of the chaotic events that unfolded on the streets, as tempers boiled over and people took their feelings out on storefronts.

Because "riots," "rioters" and "rioting" are used so disparagingly, there has not been much reason to press the point but it has been rattling around in my brain for a long time. A conversation today with anthropologist Edgar Rivera Colón helped me articulate my thought that those inchoate moments are  speaking an emotional language, asking us to listen with our hearts, not our judgements. I think they convey scream, and we are meant to hear and feel all the terror and impossibility held in that scream. I am writing "scream" in italics to make it a neologism, an emotion word.  To me, the word "riot" -- defined as "public violence, disorder or tumult" -- has a core of scream that the word "uprising" does not contain. 

As a psychiatrist, that scream is the deep and essential communication and it should neither be denigrated nor prettied up. It is, I realized in the conversation with Edgar, like domestic violence, like the moment when the battered spouse picks up a rolling pin and bashes in the head of the abuser. We are supposed to hear the breaking point in the act, the straw that broke the camel's back, "no worse there is none, pitched past pitch of grief," as the poet wrote. 

If we could hear the scream, and hear in it the years of torment, we would understand that the battered spouse and the rioter are acting in self-defense. We would honor the courage of their refusal -- which I think is what Dr. Aptheker was trying to get at -- and we would see from their acts the structural violence that was and is the real danger threatening all of us.  

I worked with Hannah Cooper for two years on our book, From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Approach to Ending Police Violence. I read a lot about the kinds of brutality that define policing at its worst. The key analysts of the issue, like Shaun King and Paul Butler, have helped us to see the vast and insidious system of support for this brutality, so extensive that it is nearly impervious to change, and hence the scream.  

But we know that this scream at this moment holds much more than the rage at police brutality: the path of the coronavirus has revealed the dense fabric of inequality in a manner we have never seen before, the Grim Reaper striding the paths of social stratification to take the weak, the marginalized, the exposed, while those with wealth and power tweet their derision and deny shelter to the terrified.  If this were all going to end in this tenth week of shelter-in-place we might feel some hope, but we see 40 million unemployed, jobs disappearing not to return, and mass evictions and hunger looming on the horizon.  

This particular scream has risen from the streets to reach into the hearts of all of us.  Maybe ten weeks ago our ears might have been stoppered with the certainty of the next paycheck, but not now.  Now we see, now we hear, now we are so hurt.  In this moment we both feel the scream and see the system that is hurting all of us.  I find, for myself, that it is only in drawing on spiritual resources that I can do both of these tasks.  As Chogyam Trungpa said, "Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun.  Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea."  

Put another way, in the immortal voice of Odetta, "Another man done gone," a song which is so precise in conveying the pain it has survived decades and crossed cultures, giving us in music an understanding that defies words, yet she holds us to it, helps us face it. In the embracing power of her art, we go deep, which opens time to think.

We need time to absorb these ten weeks of revelation, to digest that we aren't going "back to normal," but to somewhere else, somewhere new. One step forward is to get on the "bus" and go the Poor People's Assembly on June 20th. RSVP now. You can come on the "bus" of 400 Years of Inequality which will board at 9:30am for the 10am rally. You have to bring your own cake, though we will provide recipes. And you have to make your own signs, though there will be lots of models. You could also organize your own "bus" with your friends and relations.  We have to be there, in the space of indignation and planning, so that we can move forward together, in a massive moral fusion coalition, towards a new future that reflects what we are FOR.  

Coronavirus: How We Help -- Gifts for the Spirit

Collective recovery is all about knowing that there is an "us" which has been wounded in this period.  We've been wounded by death, by illness, by intense strain, by retreating away from each other, by the failure of businesses and organizations that have anchored our lives.  We have lost touch with one another in ways that we will never know, except in the deep foreboding that "things have changed."

There is no amount of individual therapy that can heal "us."  This is something we have to do together.  People know this intuitively, but when we articulate collective recovery, we can do it faster and more thoroughly.  Here's what we need to know:

THE THREE GOALS

• Heal the suffering of the individuals;
• Heal the fractures among our communities;
• Undo the inequality which has intensified this catastrophe and hobbled us from managing it.

THE KEY IS TO MOBILIZE OUR ORGANIZATIONS:

• Our organizations are key to getting it done fast and well;
• Our organizations must reconnect in three directions -- from each organization to its constituents. from the organizations to the other organizations, and from the coalition of organizations to our policymakers;
• Every organization has a role to play, from those as small as the Youth Choir in a church to those as large as the American Medical Association.  

What I want to do in a series of posts is to share stories of organizations that are doing their part.  There are an infinite number of ways organizations can contribute. Let us start with GIFTS FOR THE SPIRIT, because we need this to keep up the motivation for the long haul of safe transition, possible new waves of infection and rebuilding what has been damaged.

The formal and informal networks of musicians of New Orleans, activated by Wynton Marsalis, recorded a second line for all of us. My friend Sarah Townley texted some of us in her network her prayers for Dr. James Mahoney, who died while tending patients in Brooklyn.  I shared the Second Line link with her and she wrote back, "Thank you for this -- this got Cecilia and I doing a kitchen dance. So moving. So necessary."

Our Lady of Hope Catholic Church took to the streets of Queens to bring church to the people.  Rev. Peter Purpura with a small procession walked the neighborhood of Middle Village and met with parishioners who have set up small tables with worship items to meet with him.

The Poor People's Campaign's "Stay in Place, Stay Alive, Organize and Don't Believe the Lies" has asked artists to make posters with those slogans.  This one arrived in my inbox today.  Its coherent, joyful message lifted my spirits, assuring me that I am NOT alone is hating the injustice that permeates our nation and has made this pandemic so horrible for us.