Life – Candid Observations

I learned early that having a virus was much more deadly than having a bacterial infection. The latter could be treated with antibiotics. On the other hand, There was no miracle drug for viral diseases. Viruses had to “work their way” out of our bodies.

I remember reading stories in Readers Digest about the predicaments of young children, many of them babies, falling ill and succumbing to viruses and I learned to fear them. Being sick was one thing; being sick but having no medicinal cure or treatment was quite another.

When my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I remember watching in horror as she suffered. Her cancer was treated with radiation and chemotherapy, and yet she remained sick and got worse. In the end, the disease won. Cancer consumed and killed her – and I remember thinking that cancer must be a virus because medicines could not kill it. At that time, it seemed that there was nothing effective enough to kill the seed or abnormality that caused it, and it refused to “work its way out” of affected bodies. To me, it was like a cold, only far worse. The difference is that the virus that causes head and chest colds can be forced out by consuming liquids and resting.

But there is no liquid, no tonic, that this country can consume that will push this hatred and bigotry out of the American political and sociological ecosystem Our country has a sociocultural belief system that behaves like a virus, carved out of the need to find justification for the treatment of Black people in this country. While that belief system was always in place, it seems to have gotten worse for white evangelicals twice: once after the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, and once again after the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v Board of Education that determined that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.

Necessary for white people in this country to feel comfortable was for non-white people and women to “know their place.” White people determined themselves to be dominant. Black people, Native Americans, and women fell into lower categories. As long as these people did not rise against white authority or challenge white men in power, things were said to be going well.

But when, after slavery and during Reconstruction Black men were given the right to vote and did so, tipping the scales of power toward a more equitable society, those who had been in power began to wretch with fear and anger, and they rebelled. They intensified efforts to keep Black people under their control, creating Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, designed to put and keep things “back” to where they were “supposed” to be. That included taking away their right to vote.

I have not researched how prevalent was the fear of miscegenation when Black people were enslaved and white men raped Black women at will and were never held accountable. But what did happen was the “race mixing” they feared would happen between Black and white children as they railed against the 1954 US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.

Though the race mixing had already been put in motion by the actions of white men free to rape whomever they wanted, now, with Black and white children attending the same school, the issue of “race mixing” gained a seat in the front row of the American drama of race relations. The government was going against the will of God, who, some said, was the “original segregationist,” using selected scriptures from the Hebrew Bible including the story of Ham and the story of the Tower of Babel, among others. The government was breaking divine law in pushing for racial equality and an end to segregation anywhere, but especially in public schools. So enraged with the ruling were the people of the South that they intensified their fight against racial equality using their conception of God and their interpretation of the Bible as proof. In 1954, Rev. Carey Daniel of Dallas, TX preached a sermon entitled, “God, the Original Segregationist.”(https://crdl.usg.edu/record/usm_hmp_mus-m393-0031) Daniel and others posited that God intended for all races to live separately, which was why the Bible said that God created separate continents and scattered the people who were in the Tower of Babel. Had God intended the races to live together, God would have created the world’s geography in such a way that supported full equality of all. The government, they said, was encouraging people to go against God’s will.

What they did not mention in their diatribes was that it was they who had apparently gone against the will of God, as they were the ones who explored and “discovered” lands that non-white people already inhabited, took residents of those lands out of their country, and brought them to the Americas. The miscegenation they so feared had been begun by them.

This virus of white supremacy has so badly infected this country that it has spread, like the virus that caused COVID-19, around the world. The United States has created its own strain of white supremacy that it has taught to everyone in the world who, in turn, recognizes and uses it as a point of attack, and pounces on at every opportunity to weaken the country that has boasted that it is better than others.

Our enemies are quite familiar with our peculiar virus and have no qualms about attacking us at times when the virus rises up.

We are an infected country. The question is, “How do we address it? How do we get rid of the virus that is still swirling around in our national digestive system? We cannot pass laws that will get rid of it, nor is there a quick sociological fix. The virus has settled into the American DNA and is multiplying.

Will the virus work its way out of our national constitutional framework? Or will it finally dehydrate us as a nation and cause us to become so weak that we will be ripe for the enemies that want to overtake us?

A candid observation …

I just heard an interview on CNN between Wolf Blitzer and Deepak Chopra and it made my skin crawl and my spirit cry.

Chopra, talking about his concern about his belief that the king of pop was addicted to prescription drugs, also said that Michael hated himself.

He said that he kept his face covered because he was ashamed of how the vertiligo made him look. (the disease takes all pigment from the skin). And, Chopra said, he engaged in “self-mulitation,” including plastic surgery, to make himself feel better about the way he looked.

I thought of how I have heard people say they hate themselves because of the way they look. Overweight people will often stay in the house because they do not want to go outside and be stared at. I remember Oprah saying that after she had gained weight after losing a lot that she felt terrible, that she didn’t want be onstage and accept an award, that she felt uncomfortable and self-conscious on her own show.

How quickly we forget that we like to “fit in,” and that we like to be liked. We need to be liked; we need the affirmation of people, and even though Michael Jackson received great affirmation for his great and unique talent, it was the sneers about how he looked that he heard more.

He was a great man, and a greatly misunderstood man. He gave all he had inside through his music and dancing, and received acclaim for that, but knew the whispers about him were not good.

If it is a fact that he was addicted to prescription drugs, I wonder if it was partly because he needed to numb the pain. I think it is a fact that all of us, or most of us, are addicted to something. I do not understand it – this tendency of us to need something with which to self-medicate, but what I do know is that we as a culture, or maybe we as people everywhere in the world, seek to ease the pain of the reality of being alive.

Deepak Chopra talked about Michael’s addiction to prescription pain meds. Oprah and others have talked about food being their drug of choice. There are those addicted to cigarettes; I heard, in light of the recent sex scandals involving national legislators, that they were possibly addicted to sex. Dr. Drew said in an interview that sexual addiction is one of the hardest ones to lose. There are people addicted to gambling, others are addicted to hurting themselves.

What in the world is up? Why can’t we live without the addictions?

What makes me sad about Michael Jackson, his pain and his possible addictions, is that it shows how unsympathetic we are, how prone we are to rush to judgement and make disparaging remarks about others, remarks that hurt bad and go very deep. How many of us sneered at Michael Jackson’s consistently changing appearance, due to the excessive plastic surgeries? How much do we laugh at and criticize people who are obviously addicted or out of control? And how much of our criticism and laughter is an attempt by us to run from our own demons?

I would sure like to know the physiology of addiction, or maybe the psychophysiology of addiction. I would like to know what it is about humans that makes us so prone to need a crutch to get through our days and nights. But I would also like to be able to understand our incapacity as humans to show real compassion for each other.

We would rather point a finger and laugh, as well as make assumptions about what is than to extend a hand to someone who is obviously in trouble.

It happens, often, that great people are very often very tormented people. Michael Jackson falls into that category, or at least it seems. If it was that he was addicted to pain meds, and the doctors with whom he was in relationship fed his drug habit in order to collect healthy paychecks, I will be angry and sad, but not surprised …because people are also addicted to power and money.

Or at least that’s my candid observation.