I felt like having some conversation, so I drove into town (which town is often referred to in the southern part of the state as “four square miles surrounded by reality”), and visited some friends at the local bakery. We talked about growing tomatoes and marijuana, about Veterans and small business owners, about Zen Buddhism and ecosystems, and we talked about music. We talked about everything but politics or coronavirus.
Then something unexpected happened. One of our crew suddenly let loose a condemnation of the foolish people in our little town, fearful of the corona “hoax,” wearing masks even while bike riding. We were all pretty surprised at this outburst, and one of my friends had the good communication skills to offer the opposite opinion in a pleasant way. He said, “maybe they are just trying to be good citizens.”
But then the other went on with a hostile tirade toward Black Lives Matter, and the looting. He couldn’t believe the city of Seattle had let those protests go on for so long, pushing those small businesses to the verge of bankruptcy. He himself was a small business owner, and he said if someone spray painted a slogan on his wall he would beat the shit out of them. He said he knew business owners who were scared to paint over a slogan because they were afraid there would be repercussions from the “woke liberals,” but if it happened to his storefront he “would fight fire with fire and pull out my AR-15.”
Our good communicator then said, basically, that he believed in the power of love, not hate, to counter angry people, including Black Lives Matter protesters, and he told a story about a zen master who was on a subway when a large man started bullying all the other passengers. Instead of inspiring fear in the monk, however, the bully was stilled by the holy man’s compassion, and spent the rest of the ride with is his head in the monk’s lap, crying.
The angry member of our group then apologized and said he just needed to blow off steam, and of course, everybody was forgiving. It is nice that in my town we all can feel free to express ourselves without losing our friends.
I was envious of the quick responses my friend had — in the moment I hadn’t known just how to respond. My thoughts weren’t about love or compassion, but about property and possessions. Personally, I always felt that if somebody took something from me — a guitar or a computer for instance — they probably needed it more than I did. But this guy had invested his life in his business, and he had a family, and he was fearful of losing it all. Nonetheless I felt his anger was altogether too violent, but it took me twenty-four hours for my answer to come to me.
I wished I had asked him whether he would have opened his business in that spot if it was in a flood zone, say, close to a river. For floods do happen, regularly, every five years, or ten years, or a hundred years. The flood of human anger flowing into the streets is, though human, nothing more than a predictable natural disaster. Just as a dike holds back a river for only so long, so can racism only hold back the ideals enshrined in our founding documents for so long.
Qualia in the mind always leads us to ideals, whether it is the thought of a perfectly ripe berry or our sense for justice and equality. We know whether a berry is under-ripe or over-ripe, and we know whether someone’s rights are being denied or privileged. The flood of protesters into our streets and businesses is just a natural “disaster” which is four-hundred years overdue.