Protest Thyself, Too!

“A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk is but a tickling cymbal, where there is no love.”  — Francis Bacon

We live in interesting times. Come on, they are always interesting. But maybe not always so crazy. What has happened to our inverted culture? Psychological projections run amok “the other.” The media has us believing there is racial brutality everywhere. Education has us believing we should self loath for perpetuating this brutality. Guilt is all abound, and the white person becomes a slave to a narrative of self-abasement. Black people are used as ponds to get approval and alleviate this pain for the white person. It does nothing for black people, and it creates a culture of victimization. It also allows the virtue-signaling white “noble sufferers” to wield power and control. The white sufferer can now be empowered to bully others for their perceived complicity. It's a viscous cycle that is divorced from data (facts) where things are not so bad in reality, but evidently pretty bad in our heads.

I have never been called to protest that much. While I may not be civic in nature, when it comes to protests it's rather I don't feel authentic in group fear mongering. It's often a collective indoctrination for those who can't think for themselves, or an outlet for those that need to project infantile emotions that can't be moderated in a silent room. 

All in all, it's mostly a misuse of energy.

Paul Tillich acknowledged we are always projecting, but he also acknowledged there is a Screen we can't project. But it seems we forgot about this: “Imagine a 10 x 10 x 10 foot room. In the center is a 1 x 1 x 1 foot cube. All the Insanity in the World is in the Cube. I am this Cube. But even more Importantly, I am the Room” (anonymous social media post).

The Screen or the Room is the focal point that shows how divided we are, not just among each other, but mostly in our own hearts. We are all complicit to Sin; however, we are never going to alleviate our transgressions until we take a good heart look at ourselves.

Thomas Merton noted, “If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” It's not just about the police, Trump, America's history, or white people. There is something deeper within the human condition: the ability to inflict harm onto ourselves and others is part of history and it has never been isolated to one group. All ethnicities, races, creeds and skin colors have “practiced” it.

All our ancestors, over thousands of years, have dealt with minority status in one form of another. Those in power have corrupted, as that is what power does when it is in the hands of the fallible human. The difference is from where we identify with this fallenness: are we the weight of history, or do we bear the weight of history? And from Whom can save us from it.