Raw Unrest

A state of unrest can result from the fatigue of inaction as easily as from the fatigue of over-exertion. In my life I have felt the latter more often. In fact the harder I work, the more rested I become — given the opportunity to sleep, of course. I recommend hard work as the best antidote to unrest.

This is a moment when white Americans, include myself, need to stay unrested— to live in it. Stay unrested with our fellow black Americans. We, as white Americans need to to have a conversation about how we are are representing America, not whiteness. Every moral person, religious or otherwise must see this moment in its raw energy and ask, “how can I do better?”.

The most common result of the unrest of inaction, for me, is a state of unplaceable anxiety. I have often turned away from my privilege as a white man in contemporary society, often to my economic and social detriment, but what I’ve learned from the experience is that turning away from privilege is a useless, effete gesture. It benefits no one, changes nothing and wastes the opportunity. It’s also a form of denial. If you have privilege, use it to help others who don’t.

It may seem that everything is overwhelming at this moment and you are not wrong. We are facing many overlapping challenges and its clearly not getting easier any time soon but the most useful thing we can all do to prepare yourself and to ward off the paralysis of being mentally overwhelmed is to come to an understanding of the interrelation and interdependence between and within those challenges. In this way we can find action that strikes at the underlying causes and work, however incrementally, towards the meeting all of those challenges.

I bought an American flag and I will display it proudly, without any reservation, this 4th of July. The reservations that I’ve had in the past have been swept away not by the tragedy and violence on display but by the upwell of support I’ve seen in the street and the fact that they’ve, by and large been allowed to do so.

I feel like I’ve come home today. I’ve ben struggling with the knowing that something is wrong with America as long as I can remember and I know that those wrongs have not been righted, yet but they are being acknowledged in a new way that I’ve never seen before.

The wrongs I understand, as I have come to understand them, are rooted in economics. Racism originates in a system of social control in service of an economic system. Some benefit from this system, some are disadvantaged by it but all are controlled by it. White Americans need to have a conversation about how they are being controlled by the same economic system as black Americans. Most Americans are more disadvantaged by the current economic system than benefit from it — black, white or any color label you’d like apply to human beings.

White Americans have for too long been told that they benefit from the subjugation of black Americans. We need to to see that we have more to gain by raising up our black brothers and sisters that we do in keeping them down. Until we internalize this and act on it politically we will participate in our own subjugation. If we allow our black brothers and sisters to be denigrated and disrespected we lose all moral argument when those same powers pour opioids into our communities, level our landscapes and poison our water to extract wealth from our land.

When we live with an economy of extraction and control, we are kept from being our full selves. America can do better. We are already reimagining what capitalism can be. We are in that inflection moment of change and we need to channel our anger, our anxiety into political action. Many of us have time in this pandemic moment to learn how we’ve gotten to this place and where we want to be when it’s over. I have a great optimism like I’ve never had before.

I’m not sure if I support THE Green New Deal but I do support A Green New Deal. I think its a good place to start and we should talk about what it means because, clearly, we are going to need something more than the CARES act or the Paycheck Protection Program to get ourselves out of this crisis and whatever you, or I, think about those programs, they have bought is some breathing room but we need more than an extension of these band-aids or the“fire-hose” of money that the Fed is spewing into the market to distort the very notion of a “free” market.

Let’s start talking…